Key Elements of a VoC – Voice of Customer – Program

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Essential Steps to Capture the Voice of Your Customers and Analyze Their Experience

Much of the data that is required to assess the ways in which customer calls are handled, how they are processed, quality of service, and the overall customer experience they receive is contained within phone conversations between contact center agents and customers. With the phone still being the preferred method of contact for consumers when it comes to addressing issues, both simple and complex, there is no argument that call centers need automated technology solutions to help them capture and categorize these voice interactions with customers.

Call centers use various technology solutions to monitor their performance, track business to the source, and stay on top of their contact center agents for insights on training opportunities and employee evaluations. There are complex workforce optimization suites that require hardware and software installations and maintenance, all the way down to simple, cloud-based call recording and speech analytics solutions that focus intently on the actual voices of customers to learn their wants and needs.

What is speech analytics? This technology is defined as a systematic approach used to analyze customer conversations that take place over the telephone. In other words, speech analytics is the process of using technology to automatically analyze recorded speech to gain greater insight into customer interactions. Speech analytics applications are commonly deployed in call centers, where a large number of calls take place every day between customers and customer service agents. It is relevant and useful technology for businesses of all sizes; from the SMBs to the enterprise level.

How does the technology work? There are nine essential steps in capturing the customer experience when it takes place through a literal voice channel, all which can be achieved using advanced call monitoring and audio mining solutions:

1. Research shows that consumers still prefer to have live conversations over the phone to handle customer-service related issues with the companies they do business with. Providing the customer service toll-free line and encouraging customers to call rather than email will provide the necessary data files to start mining audio calls for quality assurance and key phrases that have impact on the customer experience.

2. Define clear goals and objectives that the company wants to meet as part of the customer experience. Include metrics for analysis and process change details that are critical points of contact along the customer experience journey.

3. Record inbound calls with recording technology, preferably cloud-based because it is cost-effective and does not require any software or hardware installations.

4. Run all recordings through an automated, cloud-based speech analytics solution.

5. Establish search criteria within the speech analytics platform to categorize calls based on the unique key words and phrases that are relevant to your business and also to the goals that you defined in step two.

6. Create reports that encapsulate the call analytics and highlight trends within the categorized calls. This establishes the gateway to easily track business trends based on occurrences of key phrases against the volume of inbound calls.

7. Share the knowledge and insights that are gained across the company and relevant departments so that all parties that contribute to the customer journey have the data they need to analyze, and leverage to implement action.

8. Leverage the data and knowledge to affect change in the organization with the goal of improving the customer experience.

9. Track changes and outcomes back to the objectives established at the onset so you can gauge performance of obtaining these goals.

Finally, the customer experience is an ever-moving, fluid data point, so the last step is to monitor and revise business goals to continually enhance the customer experience as the business changes and grows, and as the customer’s needs change.

What type of results does speech analytics deliver? There are unlimited uses for speech analytics technology, from monitoring contact center agents for script compliance, to delving into the data to create employee training programs based on customer needs, to new product development, and sales up-sell/cross-sell management for higher conversion rates and revenue.

Some of the performance metrics that have been tracked and improved after implementing call recording with speech analytics include:

* 59% increase to inbound lead conversion rates: How? Employee training and coaching efforts as a direct result of insights gleaned from customer conversations.

* 100% compliance with federal regulations, and reduction in litigation risk: How? Adherence to scripts, which address issues mandated in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act – TCPA.

* 18% reduction in call monitoring hours:
How? Fast, automated audio mining technology sorts calls based on key phrases and isolates customer conversations that need attention.

There is valuable data and insights contained within every single phone call that comes into a business, and there is technology available to help businesses capture and extract those insights so they can act on the data to improve operations, and improve the customer experience.

Jeanne Landau
Jeanne Landau has 10+ years of experience leading the public relations, social media and content marketing programs for 800response and CallFinder, delivering telecommunications solutions and cloud-based marketing technology tools including call recording, speech analytics, advanced call routing platforms, call tracking metrics, and vanity 800 toll-free services.

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