Call Center Management Featured Article
Why Should You Capture the Voice of the Customer?
Companies today spend a great deal of time trying to meet customer wants and needs by guessing at what those wants and needs are. Often, they come up short. It’s hard to imagine what a customer might be looking for if you’ve never been a customer of the organization you work for. For this reason, many companies are striving to bring “the voice of the customer” into the marketing and operations equations.
What is The Voice of the Customer?
The voice of the customer, or VOC, is an effort to collect the actual words and responses of customers, aggregate them, analyze them and draw conclusions based on real customer feedback. This might involve customer surveys, social media polls or, in many cases, call recordings of the customers themselves.
While it was once impossible to listen to every call a company recorded, today it’s possible thanks to technologies like analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). With careful use of these technologies, the voice of the customer can become the primary source of market intelligence for any company. This information can then be used to provide customers with improved products and services.
The VOC Helps Improve Call Center Operations
While of course the final goal is to sell more products and services to a wider audience for the purpose of profit, VOC can also help you retool your contact center operations with this goal in mind using customer feedback. This way, you can actually reduce some of your costs by focusing on call center activities that lead to higher customer satisfaction and improve quality metrics the call center may have been struggling with.
“The focus is on capturing the ‘voice of the customer’ – demeanor, personality, words/phrases used most often – to extract recurring themes,” wrote Verint’s Monet Software (News - Alert) in a recent blog post. “Calls are then categorized accordingly and analyzed for any recurring patterns. These patterns can help to identify the root causes of why some KPIs are not moving in the right direction.”
If your contact center is struggling to raise the rates of first-call resolution, speech analytics in your performance management solution might uncover why: perhaps an agent is handing out conflicting information, or not speaking clearly, or using the wrong script. On the flip side, high-performing agents may be using an approach that works better in upselling or cross-selling customers, so you’ll want to identify what those tactics are so you can train the rest of your contact center staff with them.
“Large call centers have employed these techniques for years, but the practice is now becoming more commonplace at smaller and midsized centers, a result of improved technology and lower costs for top-tier quality monitoring software,” according to the Monet Software blog.
Edited by Maurice Nagle