Improve Your Customer Experience With an Integrated VoC Strategy

Knowing how customers engage with your contact center and why can be trickier than you think. Get it wrong and it can have a negative impact on your business. Customers often become frustrated if they feel like they’re being sent on a wild goose chase via an automated voice recording. It’s a common—but preventable—mistake. Recognizing which touchpoints work well, and which ones cause problems, helps you target the gaps in your customer experience.

When mapping touchpoints, keep Pareto’s principle in mind. Often 20% of touchpoints deliver 80% of the value, so focus on getting that 20% right first. It’s more cost-effective to become exceptional in the critical touchpoints and then apply those learnings and processes across others over time.

Integrate Operational Data

Integrating data from a variety of sources, such as Genesys platforms, your CRM system or other solutions, to augment feedback is also essential to ensure that customer experience runs smoothly. At every interaction, your customer expects that you’ll know about their transactions with your business and information about their accounts. This coordination enables you to properly measure the customer journey and understand how your customer interacted with the different touchpoints of your business.

Pay Attention to the Comments

While metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer effort score and first call resolution give you high-level insights into contact center customer experience, you should also pay attention to comments to understand the full picture. Comments explain the motivation for a given response, whether positive or negative. Don’t rush to conclusions based on a response without analyzing the why.

Make sure the customer wasn’t giving feedback in relation to the product or service they were disappointed with, rather than the contact center agent. Contact center employees engage with a lot of angry customers, but it isn’t necessarily their fault when the customer is unsatisfied. If a customer leaves incredibly low feedback, even in response to survey questions directly pertaining to staff, don’t count it against a staff member if it was out of his or her control.

Empower Individuals

In any contact center, empowering your staff to do their job and take ownership of managing their own performance improves the customer experience. Empowering employees fosters an environment of trust, helping teams learn from successes and analyze failures. With a Voice of the Customer (VoC) solution tailored to your contact center, you can enable your staff to track their own customer satisfaction, providing a clear picture of the aspects of interactions that customers are pleased or disappointed with.

When a suite of tools is designed with your contact center in mind, employees can take ownership to improve their own performance—providing the capability to better serve customers. They will be empowered to track their performances relative to their peers on a range of metrics. And that will, in turn, create a significant uptick in performance levels and while delivering winning customer experiences.

Think of the Economic Impact

When designing a VoC program, be sure your efforts align with a measurable outcome, such as reduced churn, increased NPS or reduced customer effort. Ultimately, the success or failure of a VoC initiative is judged by how it affects the bottom line. It can be tricky to measure the ROI of customer experience, but there are some strategies and best practices you can follow.

Genesys AppFoundry partner CX Index™ specializes in integrating data through multiple channels—a key area for your customer experience success. To learn more about integrating a strategic VoC solution with your contact center, visit the CX Index app listing on the Genesys AppFoundry Marketplace.

This post was co-authored by David Heneghan, the Co-Founder and CEO of CX Index™, a cloud-based VoC solution based in Dublin, Ireland.