Hear the Voice of Your Customers

Speech analytics is another option that you may add on to an existing performance tool suite, leveraging existing call recording technology. However, it requires appropriate staffing to have the time and resources to dig deeper into the analytics. Mining the contact data can extend to emails and chat sessions with the right technology. The bottom line: Any company considering speech analytics should consider the role it can play in understanding the VOC, and anyone considering VOC technology should look at speech analytics as a powerful tool to do more than just survey customers.

Whatever means you choose to secure customer feedback, you’ll maximize the value of that data by using the appropriate tools to analyze the input and identify actionable outcomes. Load your VOC data into a datamart to identify trends and anomalies, relate outcomes to other events within the contact center or company, and track through balanced scorecards.

Data analytics helps keep quality and productivity key performance indicators in balance. Companies with an enterprise or contact center business intelligence capability and analyst resources are more likely to reap the value from the customer feedback. Regardless of your analytics capability, maximize VOC value by analyzing and comparing external and internal quality views.

Choices for How You Source VOC Technology

Along with the many options for the technology tools, today’s market offers several implementation sourcing options. These options include traditional premise-based solutions that more readily integrate with other in-house systems, and hosted or managed services that can bring results more quickly, often with value-added services such as analytics or follow-up contacts.

We detailed sourcing options and tradeoffs in our “Contact Center Technology Sourcing” article in the February 2010 issue of Contact Center Pipeline. With the high demands on IT time, survey technology can be low on the IT “to do” list. Thus, hosted applications or managed services provide an alternative to pursue VOC without waiting for IT to make it a priority.

There are some characteristics specific to VOC technology that you should consider in sourcing decisions. The survey application might need to integrate with your IVR, email routing or your Web site. Best practice suggests consolidating VOC input with internal metrics comparisons and balanced scorecards, which could also trigger other technology integration needs. You also need to integrate VOC with contact center processes so that results lead to appropriate actions in coaching, training, process change, etc. Table 2, on page 4, presents the considerations for each sourcing choice.