Best practices for acting on voice of the customer (VOC) insights at scale

The true impact of a holistic voice of the customer (VOC) program doesn’t come from just knowing what your customers think about interacting with your organization, or just gaining insight into the seemingly unconnected issues that are actually impacting your CX KPIs.

Although those are key building blocks, quantifiable business results come from taking action on customer feedback insights, at scale. That means automated, orchestrated actionability, so, for example, contact center agents are automatically alerted to consistently close the loop with customers across all channels. It also means being able to quickly and easily compare quality, sentiment, and CSAT on a unified agent desktop.

In this article, we’ll cover the hallmarks of a modern holistic VOC solution that can help your contact center consistently take impactful actions, then we’ll share three case studies that demonstrate best practices for taking action on VOC insights, at scale.

Act on feedback to improve satisfaction, drive efficiencies, and increase agent engagement

The idea of customer-centricity isn’t just about understanding the customer’s perspective, it’s about provoking change/improvement inspired by their feedback.

This approach enables a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey, addresses dissatisfaction, empowers agents, and drives impactful changes across the organization.

Here’s how a modern VOC solution supports customer-centricity:

Now, let’s dive into the business results that you can achieve when you successfully implement such a solution and follow VOC best practices to take effective action on customer feedback insights.

3 case studies of VOC best practices in action

Sometimes, the term “best practices” is used almost philosophically—like wishful thinking for the way that something could or should ideally be done, if nothing stood in the way.

That’s not the case here.

When we talk about VOC best practices, it’s based on our years of real-world experience helping thousands of global organizations plan, implement, and optimize holistic VOC programs using CXone Feedback Management.

Following are three case studies of organizations in the telecom, financial services, and transportation industries that demonstrate battle-tested best practices for generating and taking action on holistic VOC insights, at scale—and the impactful business results that can be achieved when you do.

1. How a telecom provider increased loyalty by closing the loop, at scale

A telecom provider with 33 retail locations and 65 contact center agents who handle 460,000 annual contacts wanted to gather comprehensive VOC data, analyze the results, and transform those insights into useful output to help them reduce churn, strengthen loyalty, and close the loop on customer issues.

They implemented a journey-based, digital-first approach to omnichannel feedback using CXone Feedback Management, which empowered the team to uncover CX issues and orchestrate taking corrective action, at scale.

Through their holistic VOC program they were able to:

• Automatically identify churn risk and trigger account reviews, with consistent outreach to close the loop with customers across all channels
• Deliver customized training and marketing guidance to frontline employees
• Drive targeted product and service improvements, using text analytics + Likelihood to Recommend scores

With deep VOC insights, at scale, the company has improved their ability to rapidly respond to customer needs, resulting in:

• NPS of 87.5, far above industry average
• 2x increase in customer survey response rate
• Reduced churn, increased loyalty—new service recovery team proactively finds best fit solutions for customer needs

2. How a financial services firm embedded a customer-first culture enterprise wide with holistic VOC

A financial services provider that operates across five global regions, offering multiple portfolios and 100+ products was looking to embed a customer-first culture and improve CX by building a holistic VOC program. They wanted to establish closed-loop and act on key drivers that were impacting loyalty.

They partnered with NICE to eliminate data silos and build a holistic VOC program. Through CXone Feedback Management, they implemented a closed-loop methodology designed to not only capture insights from their global customer base, but also empower over 600 employees to act on those insights effectively.

They began by conducting dozens of stakeholder interviews to define VOC success criteria, then took a journey-based, digital-first, omnichannel approach to customer feedback and closed-loop automation.

After the company successfully rolled out a VOC engagement plan to all stakeholders, employees were empowered to act on holistic VOC insights at scale and:

• Identify $3.8M in new revenue and product opportunities
• Collect 50+ ideas for product and service improvements and competitive differentiation
• Complete 3,000+ follow up activities with clients
• Follow up on 70%+ of feedback
• Achieve NPS 24 points above the average B2B loyalty rating

3. How a global transportation company increased loyalty and customer acquisition by identifying and eliminating friction points

With ambitious goals for financial growth, a transportation company with 12 global locations, 1,400+ shippers, 158k carriers, and 100+ retailers wanted holistic insights into factors driving customer satisfaction in order to improve loyalty and increase acquisition—specifically through recommendation, referenceability, effective expansion, and upsell.

Since holistic VOC goes far beyond contact center interactions, the company was also interested in implementing a structured communication plan driven by sales and account teams ahead of QBRs with their Tier 1 accounts—and sharing those results with key stakeholders.

The company worked with NICE to design and launch pulse surveys six weeks in advance of customer QBRs to collect feedback and identify pain points. They then followed best practices to refine surveys to improve response rates and engagement and get the data necessary to generate actionable insights. Finally, they shared VOC insights with relevant employees through alerts, notifications, and role-based dashboards.

By following best practices and empowering relevant teams to close the loop and address problems before they escalated, the company achieved:

• More than 2x improvement in response rates
• Significant reduction in churn risk
• 177% increase in NPS

The benefits of actionability, at scale, within a single platform

As detailed in the above case studies, in order to continually drive quantifiable business value, modern CX initiatives should include a holistic VOC program that uses omnichannel customer feedback, embedded within a single platform, to deliver actionable insights, at scale.

Organizations that share insights companywide and take action on those insights across the customer journey become truly customer-centric and achieve significant business results—including increased customer loyalty, reduced churn, greater operational efficiency, and higher revenue.

This knowledge brief from Aberdeen Strategy & Research can help you learn more about today’s VOC best practices and the results that best-in-class organizations have achieved by adhering to them.