Predicting Customer Futures

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Richard Owen, Founder of OCX Cognition, located in Scottsdale, AZ, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

OCX Cognition is a predictive CX analytics software company. That means we deliver customer experience (CX) scores and analytics for every single customer account (not just those that respond to surveys). Those analytics are updated every day as customers interact with your company, and because they are fundamentally connected to the operational data of your business, they give a unique insight into how to prevent churn and sell within accounts. We do this using machine learning and the operational data companies already have.

Our customers are innovators who know that the customer perspective is the best guide for both strategic and operational planning but also know that traditional survey-based CX programs deliver inferior data that can’t be trusted. They’re looking for customer insights of a quality on par with their financial data to replace the infrequent, fractional insights delivered by surveys. Fundamentally, we solve the data problem that’s the reason most CX programs fail to deliver business value.

Tell us about yourself

My co-founder Brian Curry and I have a long history in the customer experience space. We worked together at Satmetrix, where as CEO for 13 years, I led the team that co-created the Net Promoter Score (NPS) back in 2003. At the time, NPS was revolutionary, and it delivered successes for early adopters, but over the years, the survey-driven methodologies behind it have lost their power to help companies pull ahead of their competition.

Brian and I understood that the core problem plaguing CX programs is the data they produce. No one trusts data collected from a small percentage of customers once or twice a year – and they are right not to. No one would do financial forecasting based on data of such poor quality, yet CX programs have been pretending they can offer valuable insights. Our software solves the CX data problem, and it is even more revolutionary than NPS was back in the day.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

We solved an incredibly complex data science and machine learning problem to deliver the insights our software produces. Our software is proven in the real world. Today, our customers use the OCX Cognition platform to transform the way they incorporate the customer perspective into decision-making. They’re re-imagining their proactive customer success models, uncovering granular details about how to serve customers in specific situations best, navigating major technology acquisitions, completely re-imagining their seller support programs and strategies, reworking the metrics embodied in their contracts, and more. They can do all these things because they have predictive CX analytics that has changed the game for them.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Our customers really count on the insights we provide, so we feel a lot of pressure to keep improving our software so that the value we deliver continues to evolve.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Solve a problem that truly needs solving. That’s what will draw customers to you.
Look to your early customers as partners and collaborators. We were very fortunate to have great early customers, and it literally wouldn’t have been possible to create our software without their real-world data.
Be eager to hear from customers, competitors, and leaders you admire, even if they’re not in your space.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://ocxcognition.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ocxcognition/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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