Are You Listening to Me? Why VoC is Crucial to Business Success
Today’s consumers don’t just want personalization, they expect it – they anticipate a tailored approach from any business with which they interact. And the call center is no exception. As organizations attempt to meet these expectations, gaining an understanding of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is imperative.
VoC is an essential part of the customer experience (CX). It uses an “outside-in” perspective to help identify the expectations, likes and dislikes of previous, current, and prospective customers, offering a new level of insight for businesses. Yet, so many companies aren’t accessing the power of VoC because they are only relying on traditional measures to gain access to solicited feedback, which is important, but only tells part of the story. Surveys can provide organizations with valuable data, but they tend to skew more towards the extremely happy or dissatisfied and have limitations on the number of questions asked. The contact center can help fill the gaps.
The vast majority of unsolicited, crucial customer feedback is untapped. Speech analytics provides unique VoC insight by monitoring conversational behaviors with a focus created from categorization, tagging and quantitative scoring of 100% of interactions with your customers. This provides the deep level of understanding needed to create a positive experience, as well as deliver key business intelligence for better product, promotion, policies, processes, and pricing.
VoC: Where, Who, How?
In the age of social media and texting, you may assume that picking up the phone to call a customer service agent may be a thing of the past. You would be wrong. While use of these online channels is on the rise, 45% of consumers list the phone as their preferred method to interact with suppliers. Today’s customers can effectively express their needs, and companies can “listen” to those needs via multiple channels. That’s where speech analytics comes in. The right speech analytics technology gives you the power to go beyond just analyzing phone calls and extends to other channels for things like texting, chat, social media, customer reviews, and more. Evaluating all cross-channel VoC not only helps reduce frustration among callers, but also provides an increased understanding of customers’ needs, wants and disappointments across their preferred methods of interaction.
The insights generated from VoC have implications for every department in your organization. They help to create a holistic CX strategy and impact the bottom line. When you tap into the power of speech analytics, data from VoC informs the marketing team as to what campaign is gaining traction, the sales team as to what messaging is most persuasive, the communications team as to what’s gaining momentum on social media, the product team as to which items need fixing or updating, and so much more.
You can also leverage these insights to influence the Voice of your Brand (VoB). Call center agents are at the frontline when it comes to customer experience, so their performance plays a huge factor in company success. When organizations know exactly how customers feel and what they want, they’re able to improve how agents encourage engagement and react with emotional awareness to provide the best customer service experience possible. Speech analytics technology offers agents not only actionable insights from their calls but real time alerts during their calls on how to handle specific customer issues in accordance with company guidelines. In turn, agents are better equipped to revamp performance, resulting in increased first-call resolution rates (FCR), shorter average handle time (AHT), and increased customer satisfaction (CSAT). VoC and VoB enhance business intelligence across the entire enterprise – all thanks to listening to 100% of customer voices.
An Insightful Future
VoC reveals data that is typically left undiscovered by analyzing two key factors: context and sentiment analysis.
Context helps turn the content of calls from unstructured conversations to valuable insights derived from turning those conversations into structured data. Without context, you can miss out on what’s really going on. For example, a longer call doesn’t necessarily indicate that a problem is occurring, it might simply mean that the conversation between the customer and agent is particularly engaging. Speech analytics takes into account the context of customer interactions, allowing you to have a complete view of all exchanges.
Sentiment analysis also plays a large role in speech analytics and VoC. Sentiment analysis measures the positive or negative feeling the customer has towards a particular topic based on the words they are using. Combining words with acoustic measures can indicate the intensity of the emotion to provide a more holistic measure of customer emotion. When sentiment analysis scores are compared across certain topics, you can easily identify common pain points, areas for improvement in the delivery of customer support, and overall satisfaction between product lines or services.
Speech analytics uses measurable factors like context and sentiment analysis to unlock the conversational insights needed to understand VoC. It enables agents to monitor, comprehend, and alleviate situations; it provides enterprises with a deep level of understanding that facilitates the creation of positive customer interactions. Speech analytics and VoC work to drive customer experience, risk mitigation, and operational efficiency.
VoC and You
Listening is the key to customer success. Contact centers are the source of a world of data that can drastically improve customer experience and brand reputation. It is time for organizations to tap into that data, unlock the power of VoC and capture a full, 360-view of 100% of customer interactions. When consumers call the contact center, they expect companies to understand their individual needs and expectations. This is made possible through speech analytics technology. By leveraging speech analytics to uncover the truth behind the customer’s voice, organizations can give consumers what they actually want, thus transforming CX and improving business performance.
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