Advantages of a Fit-for-Purpose Voice of the Customer Platform

This blog post was co-authored by Genesys technology partner, Smoke Customer Intelligence.

Gathering and analyzing customer feedback is the cornerstone of focusing on customer experience as a competitive advantage. Voice of the Customer (VOC) measurement comes in many guises. While many platforms and technologies offer VOC measurement in its basic form, these solutions often breed more frustration than enablement.

When seeking a Voice of the Customer solution that creates real organizational value, a simple fact holds true — reach your customers where they are and then react to what they say. Without internalizing and operationalizing this objective, a feedback solution will remain superficial and of little use on a strategic level. To ensure your VOC program is pervasive, effective and truly gives you a competitive advantage, look for a robust and bespoke solution.

Understanding Your Customers

Two key factors drive the usefulness of a VOC program. First is the immediacy of feedback; second is response rate. The more feedback you get from your surveys, the greater your sample size. And that means the results you gather are more likely to represent your entire client base, statistically. The closer feedback is gathered to an actual transaction (e.g., contact center calls), the more likely the feedback is to directly reflect the experience during the interaction.

In-channel surveys

• The ability to gather feedback from customers within the channel they chose to communicate increases response rates and further ensures that feedback relates directly to the transaction.
• You can reach more customers because there’s an increased reliance on master data accuracy in terms of email addresses for interactions within other channels.
• Post-call IVR surveys that occur after an interaction with a contact center agent or a survey link within a webchat create channel adherence.

Multimedia feedback

• Interacting with customers across channels improves omnichannel digital presence.
• Using post-call IVR feedback within a contact center environment offers the ability to gather voice note feedback (.wav files) to transcribe and analyze. This is a type of feedback is only available within voice channels.

Repeated invitations to participate

• Offering initial feedback opportunities to customers within the communication channel through which they communicate allows for a repeat invitation to be sent via another channel — if they don’t participate after the initial invitation.
• If a customer doesn’t complete a post-call IVR survey, there’s an opportunity to send an email or SMS survey related to the same transaction. That increases the likelihood of response.

No Customer Left Behind

Gathering feedback isn’t enough. How your organization reacts and uses the data collected is how value is unlocked. A paradox is created through the implementation of a VOC program — an act of requesting feedback creates the expectation within your customer that their response will mean something and they will react quickly. A lack of reaction can decrease the satisfaction level of a customer, moving passives to detractors and promotors to passives.

Escalations

• Automated notification of low scores — configured to suit organizational objectives — means that teams can reach out to dissatisfied customers and rectify survey failures.
• Notifications channelled to teams outside of the contact center or other measurable touchpoints, or managed by supervisors, can ensure that ownership of customer satisfaction permeates the entire organization.
• Smart escalation routing means that different customers painpoints are handled differently, enabling a key driver of customer experience — personalization.

Driving operational change

• Gathering feedback isn’t enough. Resolving service failures isn’t enough. To drive systemic, long-lasting change, you must understand the cause of failures.
• Each escalation received should be resolved via the allocation of a “cause” classification code, bespoke to your organizational environment.
• Over time, this grouping of low-scoring feedback allows for the identification of process, people and product factors that continue to create customer dissatisfaction.

Systemic organizational improvements

• Identifying the causes of continued customer dissatisfaction provides reliable data on which you can base decisions and make changes.
• Thanks to the bespoke nature of classification cause, escalation management will uncover highly relevant areas of improvement within your operation.
• The ability to easily change measurement questions mean that, if a specific area is focused on targeted survey questions, they can be added to either uncover more detail or measure improvements.

Customer Feedback Is an Organizational — Not Departmental — Imperative

The use of VOC measurement within a departmental-specific piece of software negates the ability to infuse the organization with a customer-centric ethos. Intrinsic to effectively adopting customer experience management is being able to democratize results and measure experience across the entire customer journey. This requires not only a multichannel feedback channel, but also one that you can implemented at each customer touchpoint or moment of truth.

Democratization of results

• The ability to access information and feedback reports should be open to all who require it — both in real-time within the platform or as scheduled reports — without the need for further licensing.
• Reporting should be team- and role-specific, meaning that every level of the organization (from agent to CEO) can access metrics that are meaningful to them.
• Broad-spectrum use of results drives the widespread adoption of ownership of customer experience.

Third-party data overlay

• Being able to push and pull data via open APIs means that you can augment customer feedback data with data from across the organization, including financial, CRM data and other operational data sources.
• Survey triggers should be sourced and integrated from third-party platforms.
• Using organizational systems and data increases the value extracted from feedback data and ensures that customers have a unified feedback experience — regardless of the journey stage.

Customer journey management 

• The customer experience with your organization neither begins nor ends with an interaction through Genesys in the contact center.
• Customers aren’t channel-loyal; they interact with your organization through a variety of ways. Your ability to gather feedback should be as agile as your customers are.
• The ability to measure experiences throughout the journey within one platform ensures cohesiveness, decreases the risk of over-surveying customers and provides cascading insights across the organization.

Many VOC programs fail because the tools used to implement them aren’t powerful enough to deliver the value required. When it comes to achieving the gold standard of customer experience, opting for a free service will teach you that you do indeed get what you pay for.

Get more details by visiting their Genesys Cloud applisting in the marketplace.