Expert perspective: How to level up your voice of customer program

Imagine having a gold mine in your yard and never venturing out to dig up some nuggets.

Seems ridiculous, right? But you might be doing that very thing. If you don’t use all forms of customer feedback to learn what those customers say and feel about your business, you leave precious information sitting there, waiting to be dug up and used to both your customers’ benefit and your own.

That’s just one takeaway from a recent chat with Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester, and Art Schoeller, Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst. During the webinar “Uplevel your customer and agent experiences using VOC,” these industry thought leaders and experts discussed the benefits of a customer journey-based voice of customer (VOC) program that gathers structured and unstructured feedback across all customer interactions. When you capture digital interactions ranging from chat, SMS, and social messaging to voice and IVR interactions, you get a much deeper understanding of where customers are coming from.

A holistic VOC capturing all customer interactions empowers your contact center agents to resolve problems quickly, improve their performance, and garner higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS®) for increased loyalty and retention. It also empowers design and product teams to act on collected data to quickly adapt customer experiences and create new ones based on valuable customer feedback. In fact, our findings reflect 90% of consumers say customer service influenced NPS® (Source: Nice Satmetrix[i]).

Here are a few more nuggets of information about how you can take your VOC program to the next level to transform and enhance both customer and agent experiences.

Perception is reality when CX is the endgame

As the recent global pandemic spread and businesses shut down or went remote, contact centers saw a massive influx of calls. Call volume skyrocketed across all industries and agent workforces were challenged like never before. Contact center leaders had to learn to be more agile in how they managed their operations, listen to VOC feedback, and how they could continually improve the experience moving forward.

What became crystal clear was the critical role agents play in continually delivering on their company’s brand promise.

How customers perceive the service you provide across a broad set of interactions directly impacts brand loyalty, retention, and the willingness to recommend your company to another customer—ultimately driving revenue. In other words, perception is reality, especially when customer experience is the key driver. In fact, Aberdeen findings indicate that contact centers with VOC programs enjoy a 24% greater year-over-year (YoY) increase in Net Promoter Score® [ii]

(Source: Aberdeen).

Help agents help your customers

Consumers have all kinds of ways to interact with brands these days. Yet for the really tough stuff—such as dealing with complex problems or experiencing high levels of frustration and emotion—they pick up the phone. Accordingly, the CX bar remains just as high for voice as any other channel; maybe even higher.

To answer the desire for great service, you need to create opportunities for your agents to shine. Brands that consistently lead in customer loyalty metrics and initiatives equip their agents with information from across all channels. They invest a lot into VOC, tie it back to their contact center, and have roadmaps for continuous improvement. According to Aberdeen Group, ii companies with best-in-class, holistic VOC programs see a direct correlation to increased revenue. Specifically, they found that companies with VOC programs enjoy 95% greater growth in their annual revenue (Source: Aberdeenii).

In addition to providing customer surveys, leading VOC programs to gather unstructured and unsolicited feedback from emails, social media, call center recordings, forums, and communities, agent notes, call center transcripts, and more. And most importantly, the surface that information to agents in real-time so they can respond with empathy, get right to the issue, solve problems, and close the loop.

When in doubt, start at home base. Your contact center data is an unbelievably rich source of feedback. While all feedback is valuable, call recordings are pure gold. They help you determine customer sentiment and pick up on problems and opportunities that you’d never find out from a simple survey because you didn’t know to ask the question.

A leading automotive lender attaches a voice recording to every survey of Toyota customer or dealer interactions with them, which provides better visibility into CX performance and behaviors, faster troubleshooting, and more personalized and focused agent coaching.

It’s also important to continuously look for hot spots and find root causes of customer frustration, then continually find ways to solve them, whether by people, processes, or tools, on your customers’ channels of choice.

How to increase your VOC maturity

So how do you get to be best-in-class in VOC? No matter where you are with your program—whether you’re just starting out or already have one established—creating a holistic VOC program is a living-breathing process.

If you’ve just recently implemented a VOC program, start by doing customer surveys to gather feedback and continue from there: adding more channels, more analytics, and more actions as you move forward.

If you’re already implementing surveys, you’re off to a great start. The goal is to expand your efforts so you learn what you don’t know to ask. You’ll also complement direct feedback in ways that allow for the correlation of holistic CX insights.

If you’re gathering feedback from multiple sources and acting on what you learn, you’re doing great. But with so much change coming at us faster and faster, you want a program that has the capabilities to help you keep up.

The goal is to continually advance your program so your VOC captures all feedback types. Your program should help you proactively address problems to keep customers (and executives) happy and inform even more impactful business decisions. When your VOC helps you change for the better, you keep customers happy, strengthen loyalty, and see increased revenue.

A great case in point: One of the U.K.’s leading consumer credit companies. Using NICE holistic VOC, they started capturing feedback wherever their customers were and saw customer NPS improve by as much as 85%. They also achieved a cost savings of more than 50% in the past 18 months and reduced the number of complaints coming into the contact center by 33%.

Best practices for holistic VOC

The most mature VOC programs track customer experiences and interactions across the entire journey and make sure their organization can act on what they learn.

Track your customer experience: In addition to surveys, use behavioral data (what the customer actually did) to track CX quality. Mine speech data, such as call center recordings, to hear valuable customer sentiment. And use journey analytics to understand customer journeys, pain points, and ways to resolve them.

Drive action: Align your culture by sharing audio, not just data. An audio recording that brings data alive is incredibly powerful, especially for executives who are more disconnected from the contact center. Also, integrate VOC into your design process, using what you learn to design a service or product that will delight customers.

Missed the webinar? Watch it now

This is just a glimpse into the many valuable insights Forrester provided in the webinar. To learn more, we invite you to watch it on-demand.

In just 60 minutes, you’ll learn how to take the first steps to create a holistic VOC program that allows you to actively listen throughout the entire customer journey, empower your agents to really shine, and see increased customer loyalty and revenue. You’ll also see how best-in-class VOC programs do things differently—from embracing unstructured and unsolicited feedback, to calculating financial benefits, to embedding socialization.

Watch the webinar now.

ⁱ NICE Satmetrix: Nice Satmetrix 2021 B2C NPS® Benchmarks (2021)

ⁱⁱAberdeen Group: The ROI Of VOC: Create Happy Customers, Drive Efficiency & Improve Financial Results (2021)

Net Promoter Score, Net Promoter, and NPS are trademarks of NICE Systems, Inc., Bain and Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.