Customer Engagement

Hear the Voice of Your Customers

Your strategy may include phases with different sourcing approaches at each phase. For instance, you may want to start with a managed or hosted service to implement VOC sooner, to determine the value of the VOC or to pilot a specific media. A premise solution is a more longterm approach, leveraging a component of one of your contact center technology vendor’s suites. And keep in mind, vendors offer hosted and managed services for speech analytics, as well, enabling you to extract the voice of your customer from your recordings on a one-time basis to support targeted needs.

Now Is the Time for VOC

Sometimes too many choices are a bad thing. When it comes to seeking and understanding the satisfaction customers have in the interaction with your company, choice is a good thing. With the right strategic context and a careful look at goals, requirements and the existing environment into which the VOC technology will fit, you can find the right option to pursue.

Social Media Is the New Frontier

The contact center has an opportunity to participate in hearing the voice of the customer in social media. Social media provides the unsolicited voice of the customer and many companies are beginning to use this data as another perspective on “How are we doing?” The “tweeters,” bloggers and Facebook fans are a non-stop, volunteer, free “focus group” (albeit a self-appointed one that is likely comprised of those that are either very cranky or very pleased). Anyone putting information out to the world offers potential “VOC” input that might include customer interactions and service.

The market is beginning to offer tools to mine these public information resources. For example, many CRM applications now offer social media search engines. Once an issue is identified, these applications can turn the search results into a case within the CRM application for contact center resolution, which could trigger a targeted response to the individual, as well as a public response.

The goal is to turn a potentially bad bit of public information into good and contain the risk of viral negative publicity. Such interactions assume those publicly talking about the company would welcome a response. But the question remains: Is it all hype, or a true resource for the contact center? At this point, centers need to engage and observe; the momentum is too great to ignore. Watch, listen, learn, and then act.

Keep in mind that several departments have a stake in the customer relationship, so collaborate with others in defining how to gain and use customer satisfaction information. Never assume marketing is doing it, or that what they are doing will meet the center’s needs. Marketing does not gear its (likely infrequent, more general) surveys toward providing a real measure of contact center service quality.

As you plan for your VOC technology, keep in mind the importance of breaking down the silos to share information and leverage enterprise efforts to get the biggest bang for your buck, especially if you will be mining verbatim VOC information or using speech analytics. As you advance in your use of VOC tools, you will see how the contact center can keep marketing informed of significant product and/or service concerns that affect the brand, and show the field, support, billing, product management or other areas important insights that can help the company to collectively respond to the voice of the customer.

Lori Bocklund is Founder and President of Strategic Contact.

Brian Hinton is a Principal Consultant at Strategic Contact.

Lori Fraser is a Consultant at Strategic Contact.

– Reprinted with permission from Contact Center Pipeline, www.contactcenterpipeline.com

 

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