In my last blog, I concluded by saying that a good Voice of the Customer (Voc) program is time, money, and effort well spent. By gathering feedback at key points in your customer’s journey and acting on it, your organization can be a market leader in your respective industry.
Customer experience is so instrumental to your business that if you want your organization to survive and outlast competitors, you need to enact a VoC program. Today, I would like to expand on why a VoC program should matter to your organization and what it can do for you.
What can a Voice of the Customer program do for you?
As I said before, customer experience boils down to brand awareness and loyalty – currency these days in the world of customer experience management. If you have not built up a brand and if you do not have any customer loyalty, this will quickly be reflected in your customer churn rates and in your top and bottom line. So, what can a VoC program do for you?
- Closing the loop with an individual or a group of customers, engaging with them early enough to respond to their feedback and prevents customers from becoming disgruntled which, in turn, prevents brand erosion.
- Integrating customer insights into your decision-making leads to actionable components inside your overarching marketing strategy that will help your organization better influence and market to customers.
- With a VoC program in place, you can measure your customers’ satisfaction at different touchpoints across the customer journey, and across your various products and/or services to better understand your customers’ expectations, evaluate their experiences and prevent customer churn
- Lastly, with a VoC program your organization can evaluate the impact of these improvements on your customer metrics, like NPS®, CSAT, and any of your own business KPIs (revenue profits, costs and churn).
How do I implement a Voice of the Customer program?
One of the basic tenants of a VoC program is to gather and analyze not only point of engagement conversational data but also sentiment customer data across all channels. The fundamental underpinnings of any good VoC program are consistent data collection and analysis.
In the initial stages of a VoC program journey, data must be collected from the multiple channels. Taking an omnichannel approach is essential and having the enabling software to do this is highly imperative. Your organization will need to gather structured data, like that of your CRM system and unstructured Data from your Content Services repository. In addition, social media channels must be monitored and digital voice recordings of customer-agent engagement are an incredibly rich source of raw data and it must be transcribed, sliced and diced and analyze.
All customer information must then be prepared for consumption and analysis, voice to speech transcriptions and, where conceivable, research scientists or consultants will define the rules for analysis, templates and initial algorithms for AI to begin learning. Sentiment scoring and much more are the intricate elements of the analysis process. As you move through the VoC program journey and more data is collected and presented, interactive business intelligence reports, dashboards and alerts should become an integral part of your program. In the analysis refinement, speech analytics provides precision sentiment scoring, real-time data is leveraged, and artificial intelligence is applied to better capture customer sentiment. And finally, key performance indicators, change management and customer satisfaction benchmarks can be refined.
Consider adopting a Voice of the Customer program
Organizations will need to shift pragmatically and deploy the latest technology to ensure they’re providing an exceptional customer experience. Competing in today’s marketplace requires the right technology to not only capture voice recording at the elemental level but also to listen to all mediums and extrapolating customer sentiment.
Through our Voice of the Customer product suites, OpenText can support your organization’s VoC program strategy with capabilities that allow you to Ask for direct feedback using campaign driven, inbound and outbound surveys linked to an interaction. We can help you listen to the customer through OpenText™ Explore and OpenText™ Magellan™, with indirect analysis of all recorded interactions in combination with behavioral data and much more.
If you would like to learn more on how OpenText™ can enable your organization with a Voice of the Customer program, please visit our website.
