Voice of the Customer: Louder and More Important than Ever Before

Customer data enters a contact center via many channels—social media, telephone, live chat and more. So, it’s no surprise that customers expect to be heard loud and clear.

In fact, social media users are a large segment of the customer population. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 62 percent of men and 71 percent of women use social networking sites. Moreover, the recently published Social Media Report from Nielsen and McKinsey revealed that one in three social media users prefer to contact a company through social media as opposed to over the phone.

Maximizing every platform available for connection, positive interaction and data collection can lead to improved efficiency and customer service. Below are two ways capturing voice of the customer data can help your organization:

Lets you listen in: Voice of the customer data can help businesses quickly identify and measure trends, see what topics are trending and make strategic decisions to get ahead. For example, are customers complaining consistently about a particular product or feature? With voice of the customer data, businesses can identity reoccurrences and quickly develop a strategy to recover.

Provides insight into customer sentiments: Consumers divulge a lot more than you may think during each interaction. In fact, oftentimes what they don’t say can be extremely telling. Gathering voice of the customer data gives companies unprecedented insight into customer sentiments, including the good, the bad and the ugly. Moreover, voice of the customer data allows you to see your company the way your customers see you.

Gives you the big picture of the interaction: There is a lot of data that can be captured from customer interactions that is outside of the actual conversation. For example, you can see how the customer entered and exited the IVR system to determine if that was a positive experience. Also, you can see the agent’s actions like how many steps they took to get from one application to the next and how long they spent in each application, providing good insight into the overall efficiency of resolving the customer’s problem.