Hear Your NPS Rise and More with Voice of the Customer

You may have heard that quality monitoring technologies such as voice of the customer (VoC) are the ideal means for capturing net promoter scores (NPS). NPS, a proprietary calculation, is a management tool that can be used to measure how loyal a customer is. It’s often presented as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research, and its inventors claim that it’s strongly correlated with revenue growth.

So while VoC is useful for generating NPS, it’s helpful for much more than that. NPS is a rather one-way measurement: it gauges how customers feel about your organization right now. Generally, it exists to elicit good feedback to be used in marketing. (“Customers say we’re the best!”) While it’s useful to take the pulse of your customer base now and then, VoC should be used as a two-way measurement: not only taking a pulse, but searching for ways to improve the contact center on an ongoing basis. In other words, actually listening to customers and taking their advice, problems, questions and suggestions to heart to improve the customer journey.

Measure Real Life, Not Theory

NPS is a rather rhetorical measurement. “Would you recommend our company?” “Would you buy from us again?” Customers who say “yes” may never need or want your products and services again. It doesn’t give you the kind of feedback you need to make improvements to the customer experience right now. When you get access to the voice of the customer through interviews or using speech analytics technology, instead look for information that answers the questions, “What was your last experience like?” “What would have made it better?” “Were you satisfied with every step of the customer journey?”

Instead of taking this real-time picture once or twice a year so you have bragging rights in marketing materials, consider doing it on an ongoing basis so you can identify and correct problems before they start, or improve processes that could use some refining. Regular VoC measurements can help you fine-tune your existing customer support, test the waters on new products and services, identify outliers (either good or bad) among your call center agent staff, and determine how best to focus your agent training in the future.

Share the Insight Across the Organization

It's not only in the contact center that VoC is useful on an ongoing basis. Capturing the voice of the customers with speech analytics technology such that provided by Verint Monet, you can automatically evaluate 100 percent of your calls in near real-time, and use customer insight to help drive decision making in other departments such as marketing/advertising, billing, product development and retailing.

Edited by Maurice Nagle