Voice of the Customer: Best Practices and Strategies

There’s no denying that surveys are an essential tool for customer feedback. But you may have noticed blind spots—areas in the customer journey where you can’t see what’s happening from the customer’s point of view. And that begs the question, what else could you be missing?

Surveys are one part of a bigger customer picture—a picture you can only see with a holistic voice of the customer program (VOC).

Higher Loyalty, Lower Cost to Serve

An omnichannel VOC program provides valuable insights that help you create experiences that delight and engage customers. That results in fewer calls coming into your call centre and higher retention rates.

With less time and money spent on enticing customers to come back, omnichannel VOC adds up to greater cost efficiency in your call centre.

“Insights from across the customer experience result in tangible benefits you might not have considered,” says Carlos Robledo Suarez, Experience Consultant.

For example, an omnichannel VOC program can help with employee training, allowing you to use customer feedback for performance reviews, better employee coaching, and continuous improvement. All of which can boost agent performance, lower turnover rates, and improve morale.

The benefits of comprehensive feedback are many. That’s why we’ve compiled eight best practices to help design and get the most from a holistic VOC program.

#1: Make Your VOC Program Digital Omnichannel

A digital-first omnichannel customer experience is critical to modern customer service. Having feedback from everywhere your customers interact with you—from email to POS transactions, and SMS text to calls to your contact centre agents—helps you take meaningful action that leads to great experiences.

This not only helps you improve customer retention, but it can improve sales and wallet share, and be a proven differentiator that drives customer loyalty.

#2: Choose a Customer Journey Based Solution That Eliminates Data Silos

Focusing your VOC program on the entire customer journey allows you to create contextual experiences that have a bigger impact—and understand what’s happening all along the way.

But if the data you collect stays in separate silos, you’ll face barriers to collecting, assessing, and using the feedback in the most effective way.

Break down those silos and you can analyze and share your VOC program’s customer experience data with more speed and less friction.

#3: Ensure Your Program Is Targeted and Actionable to Drive Real Business Outcomes

A holistic VOC program drives satisfaction and loyalty by providing insights and real-time feedback that are essential for improving key business metrics such as CSAT and NPS.

The key is to empower your teams to take action on those insights. And the action can reach beyond your contact centre. Holistic VOC gives you valuable information that benefits everyone from operations to corporate strategy, making a real impact on business outcomes.

#4: Deliver Hyper-Personalized Insights to the Right People at the Right Time

Successful omnichannel VOC programs ensure that the right people in your organization have access to the right CX feedback at the right time. For example, when a front-line agent sees how multiple touchpoints have influenced a customer, her service can be hyper personalized, turning a detractor into a promoter.

#5: Include Text and Speech Analytics to Capture Indirect Feedback

Feedback collected from conversations with agents can be incredibly enlightening. The same goes for texts, chat, and social media. Using text and speech analytics, you can gain much richer insights.

When you consider that many customers don’t respond to email surveys, this additional feedback becomes extremely valuable. Think of these conversations as essential to your VOC program.

#6: Use Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics to Adapt Workflows to Accelerate Action

An AI-based solution uses machine learning to adapt in real time and close the loop on CX outcomes. It can automate and adapt many of your workflows, serving up the best actions to take based on the feedback gathered.

This helps you find resolution faster, improve customer loyalty, and reduce operational costs.

#7: Choose an Adaptive and Flexible Solution So You Can Shift as Touchpoints Shift

The best VOC programs can respond to change as it happens—so as customer touchpoints shift, your customer feedback program seamlessly shifts with them. This helps you deliver ROI during even the most dynamic times. A cloud-based solution allows you to continually improve your program on the fly.

#8: Ensure Reporting Focuses on Cross-Functional Metrics and KPIs

Your holistic VOC program is only as good as the metrics impacted. That’s why the most successful ones focus on cross-functional KPIs, such as customer churn, CSAT, and NPS.

They merge analytics and surface correlations from direct, indirect, and operational feedback to give you a much more comprehensive customer view.

Now that you understand some of the best practices for a holistic VOC program, you might like to dig deeper into the optimal approach for your team.

Author: Guest Author