The Verint Guide to Voice of the Customer in the Contact Center

For musicians, stadium announcers or stand-up comedians, a feedback loop is annoying. For CX leaders, it’s vital for delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Successful CX strategies rely on the tools used for collecting, analyzing and acting on feedback. Without an effective voice of the customer (VOC) program, you won’t be able to provide the kind of personalized experiences that modern consumers demand.

What Is Voice of the Customer?

A voice of the customer program is a strategy for listening to and analyzing customer interactions across multiple channels to understand expectations, preferences and sentiments.

Companies use VOC solutions to generate actionable insights and take actions to improve the customer experience (CX).

The feedback is gathered in several ways; analysis of contact center interactions—both voice and text—as well as:

• Customer surveys
• Social media monitoring
• Website behavior tracking
• Feedback from online communities

Crucial customer metrics are also captured, such as CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (Net Promoter Score), which are all integral to a VOC program.

VOC is one component of a wider CX program—however, the data gathered by these solutions is vital for driving strategic decisions across the enterprise.

CX Challenges for Contact Center Leaders

Digital Friction and Inconsistency

Customers are reaching out across an increasingly broad range of channels, and it’s up to businesses to meet them there. This makes it difficult to deliver consistent, effortless and frictionless experiences across the customer journey—no matter where a customer reaches out.

Disconnected CX Listening

Building CX strategies from disjointed insights can lead to poor experiences. Interaction data is often siloed across a business. If you don’t have a unified view of the whole customer journey, crucial information is missing for CX leaders when making strategic decisions.

Manual Activities and Delayed Responses

Without CX automation, your employees simply don’t have the capacity to efficiently handle the volume of issues that arise in a modern contact center.

Companies operating without effective AI-powered solutions can’t address problems in-the-moment, and risk creating customer dissatisfaction and a high level of churn.

VOC in the Contact Center (And Beyond)

An effective VOC program plays a critical role in building a customer-centric contact center by helping you gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiment, preferences and pain points.

While this enables CX leaders to deliver elevated customer experiences, the impact of the data also extends across the enterprise. By harnessing CX automation, contact center leaders can detect underlying issues in real time.

For instance, negative feedback can quickly prompt agent training or product updates to address any problems identified. Insights derived from customer feedback can also shape strategic decision making in product development, marketing and operations.

VOC’s short-term impact can help ensure improved CX. In the long term, it can improve every facet of your business that can affect a customer’s experience.

Collecting Voice of the Customer Insights

In the context of VOC solutions, there are two subsets of customer feedback data.

Structured data is quantitative and, as the title suggests, well-organized and easy to analyze. Unstructured data is the opposite—it’s qualitative and taken from unstructured sources such as open-ended questions, agent interactions (both voice and text), as well as learnings from sentiment analysis.

Both types are crucial to a successful VOC program and, when combined, offer a holistic view of the customer journey. The feedback is captured in three formats:

Direct

This is structured data from direct customer interactions—typically this means surveys, and CSAT or NPS ratings.

Indirect

When a customer is speaking about, but not necessarily to an organization. For instance, third-party review sites or social media comments.

Inferred

Insights gained from customer interactions without relying on solicited or unsolicited feedback—such as tracking customer behavior, sentiment or context around a survey response.

The Benefits of VOC Solutions

An effective VOC program helps businesses deliver consistent customer experiences at scale. Collecting customer feedback in all formats, from every source, enables better, more informed decision-making across the enterprise.

You can pinpoint key issues impacting the customer journey and implement quick fixes by taking action in real time. This helps drive AI business outcomes that include:

• Elevated CX that improves CSAT and customer loyalty
• Reduced operational costs by identifying and addressing friction in customer journeys
• Increased revenue through identifying opportunities to upsell or cross-sell.

The benefits extend beyond the customer experience to the employee experience (EX).

Using the same solutions to gain valuable employee insights through surveys—as well as analyzing agent sentiment during customer interactions—you can identify trends, address concerns, and improve your own CX and EX strategies.

These learnings can be used to create tailored coaching for individual employees, which helps increase engagement and reduce agent turnover.

5 Ways to Optimize Your VOC Program

1. Move Beyond the Survey

Surveys are still a vital element of VOC, but they aren’t enough on their own. You need to maximize the potential of direct feedback by combining it with other forms of feedback to complete your picture of the customer journey.

2. Connect Structured and Unstructured Data

Build context by layering in unstructured data with your structured feedback to uncover the “why” behind customer feedback. Rather than just seeing that a customer is frustrated after an interaction, you can use context from other customer data sources to build a bigger picture and understand the source of the frustration.

3. Monitor CX Data and Act in Real Time

Don’t just capture data—use AI for continuous analysis to spot the trends and minimize the impact of any potential issues. With real-time action you can make swift, corrective decisions before there’s any major impact on your revenue or customer loyalty.

4. Leverage AI-Powered CX Automation

Automate tasks when possible. AI-driven solutions minimize the number of manual processes, and predictive modeling enables informed decisions that improve the customer journey.

5. Drive Action at All Levels of the Organization

Improving customer experience should be a company-wide initiative. The insights generated by an effective VOC program can positively impact strategic decision-making across every department.

Listen, Analyze and Act with Verint Voice of the Customer

Verint VOC delivers differentiated outcomes in your contact center and beyond. The solution enables you to respond to customer feedback, with real-time action through unified CX data, deep analytics and AI-driven proactive actions.

Unified CX data: All your VOC data, across all sources. You can transform your program beyond traditional surveys, with a multi-channel listening engine that collects direct, indirect and inferred customer feedback.

Best-of-breed analytics: Tools that bring together structured and unstructured data and use AI to automate quick access to deep behavioral analytics.

Automated actions: AI-driven insights accessible in real time. Automate case management and prioritize the right action in real time through CX automation.

AI Outcomes with Verint VOC

$37 million Revenue Increase

A retailer used Verint Enterprise CX to analyze survey responses and uncovered issues customers were having with restrictive payment options. By adding other payment methods, the company improved digital and in-store conversion rates, achieving a $37 million increase in revenue.

+25% NPS Increase

A bank used Verint Survey Management for automated survey delivery across multiple channels. This generated analytics, dashboards and reporting which detected trends and rising issues, which were addressed in real time—giving a significant boost to the bank’s NPS rating.

$4M Revenue Increase

After discovering that many customers were abandoning shopping carts during checkout, a retailer used Verint Web & Mobile to collect customer feedback and simplified the process. This resulted in an increase in average customer spending and a $4 million boost to annual revenue.

Make Every Conversation Count

Your voice of the customer software should be part of a wider CX platform that powers exceptional experiences. The behavioral data these solutions gather are integral to the strategic decisions made in the contact center and beyond.

CX automation is essential to optimize the deep analytics and automated actions possible with an effective voice of the customer program. It helps to deliver differentiated AI outcomes that elevate CX and drive revenue.

Discover what’s possible with Verint VOC.