Customer experience (CX) is today’s competitive battleground, so it may come as no surprise that CX is now a strategic imperative for many contact centers.
In fact, according to a recent survey of more than 450 contact center leaders by Deloitte, CX ranked as the most important strategic initiative in the contact center—far outpacing revenue growth and cost containment. And, many contact center leaders report that they are now being held primarily accountable for improving their organizations’ overall customer experience.
Tapping into Voice of the Customer (VoC) has long been used as a method to understand where improvements to customer experience are warranted. It makes a lot of sense that if you’re seeking to improve the experience of your customers, you should ask them about where and how to do so.
However, VoC alone can be misleading. To fully leverage the power of VoC to make it actionable within an organization, it must be combined with context. VoC together with associated context provides the “why” and the “what” to deliver positive business outcomes. Without actionable VoC, it’s exceptionally hard to move the needle on customer experience.
This concept is of particular relevance in the contact center. Typically, leaders in these environments have no shortage of data: operational data, agent performance data, VoC data, etc. However, many report being “data rich” but “insights poor.”
To effectively leverage data to inform business decisions that positively impact customer experience, the data has to be both granular enough to correlate with expected outcomes, and able to be analyzed together with associated contextual data to create a holistic view of both the “what” and the “why.”
As a longtime trusted partner in the contact center, our customers have provided us some great insight into how they use VoC and operational context to improve their customer experience:
1) Infuse agent performance and other contact center operational data with VoC gathered directly via post-call integrated voice response surveys and post-transaction SMS and email surveys, and indirectly through call recording. This combination provides both the “what” and the “why” related to customer experience.
2) Ensure that the data is granular enough to act upon with a high confidence that the action will be correlated with desired outcomes. By linking VoC, quality assessments, performance management and operational data at the individual call level, the necessary level of data granularity is achieved to enable a predictable level of improvement for a set of recommended improvement activities.
3) Don’t forget about speed and security. By automating data flows between disparate systems, you will adhere to your customer data security requirements and help ensure that VoC is expeditiously combined with operational data to speed business impact.
To learn more about how to improve customer experience and deliver other positive business outcomes with VoC in your contact center, download Verint’s new e-book Top 5 Ways Voice of the Customer Improves Your Contact Center.
Source: Deloitte Global Contact Center Survey, 2017. In Deloitte’s third survey of global contact centers since 2013, leaders representing more than 450 contact centers discuss how their businesses will change in the coming years.
