Your customers are an essential part of your business, which means their experience when interacting with you needs to be a positive one. Customer experience is essential not just for brand loyalty and revenue—but also ensuring your organization stays profitable and sustainable.
Nobody wants to deal with a cold, uncaring customer experience. In fact, 85% of customers are willing to go out of their way to do business with a company that offers better service.
Using the voice of the customer (VoC) has always been vital in the call center industry. By taking in feedback from your customers and using their voices and opinions to get an idea of how your business runs and how your customers feel, you can deliver higher-quality service, improve your products, and boost operational efficiency.
In this blog post, we’ll show you just how vital the voice of the customer can be to your call center operations and how you can get more from your VoC data. We’ll also discuss some of the challenges of implementing a VoC program in your contact center and address the ethics of collecting customer data.
Voice of the customer (VoC) is the process of capturing and understanding customer feedback to improve the overall customer experience. Within the context of contact centers, VoC is crucial as it offers direct insights from your customers, giving you the information you need to make decisions that can significantly improve your service quality.
And this information is vital—72% of customer experience professionals say that customer experience has become more important since the pandemic. But what does it actually mean for contact centers?
Understanding the voice of the customer helps businesses better understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points. By listening to your customers, you can tailor services to meet their expectations more effectively. And by doing so, you can boost your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
By taking in this feedback from your customers, you can get a better understanding of how your customers are using your products and what they want. Market research is one way to find out about customer trends, but why not go directly to the source itself—your actual customers?
This information can proactively identify problems within your products and customer service, helping you correct before they escalate. Factoring in this information can lead to improvements in Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and overall CSAT rates.
When agents are equipped with insights from voice of the customer (VoC) data, they can better understand the impact of their behaviors on customer interactions.
They get a different perspective on what the customer is actually feeling—not just how they perceive their mood in the moment. And that awareness can significantly boost their engagement and morale as they see firsthand how their efforts contribute to positive outcomes.
Additionally, using VoC can identify areas where your agents may need additional training or support. This feedback can then be used to improve training programs and tailor coaching sessions to meet specific needs outside of what you might learn from traditional metrics.
VoC provides valuable data that can help streamline your contact center’s operations. You can identify recurring issues and inefficiencies within your internal processes by analyzing customer feedback. Then, you can use that same feedback (along with other data from your QA platform) to correct and improve those processes, significantly improving overall performance.
For example, if the voice of the customer data shows that customers frequently experience long wait times, you can implement strategies to help optimize call handling and reduce wait times. You can leverage QA data alongside VoC to fine tune (or completely rework) time-consuming processes or implement technology like dialed number identification service (DNIS) to route customers more efficiently.
This data can also help with your overall operations, not just your customer support function. You can pair this data with the other info your contact center gathers to help forecast call volumes and improve your staffing.
Trends identified by VoC data can also help you create more self-service options to help customers with common issues, freeing up agents to handle other issues.
Essentially, adopting VoC data into your contact center strategy offers more than a deeper look into your customers' habits. It’s an incredibly valuable inward look at your contact center and its strengths (and flaws).
Why stick to one communication method when your customers don’t? Capture feedback from every channel you use, including email, SMS, live chat, and surveys, on top of the classic phone call.
An omnichannel approach ensures you’re not missing any essential insights and paints a comprehensive picture of the entire customer journey—regardless of where it started.
Let’s be honest, nobody likes (or wants to do) long surveys. Ask relevant questions that can be answered quickly and will actually provide insights into the customer experience. The easier it is for your customers, the more likely they are to participate. Otherwise, you might never collect enough data to pull anything useful from your VoC analysis.
Structured data gives you the ‘what’, but unstructured data gives you the ‘why’.
Your VoC data can come in many forms, from numerical, structured data to abstract information like social media posts and surveys. While your structured data will be much easier to analyze, it can’t paint the full picture of what’s happening.
Using both types of data allows you to fully understand customer sentiment.
One size rarely fits all when it comes to data analysis. Using a variety of analytical techniques can uncover different types of insights that can all be used to enrich your contact center. Use methods like sentiment analysis, text mining, and statistical analysis to look at your VoC data from every angle, and then leverage it to drive improvements within your contact center.
The power of AI for data analytics is no secret. AI can automate this labor-intensive process to scale far beyond what you could realistically do manually.
100% interaction analysis, root cause analysis, and sentiment analysis, can all be performed in a fraction of the time it would take with a purely human analytical function. Using AI can make it significantly easier to spot trends and patterns within the data and frees your analysts to dive deeper into these findings.
Insights are only valuable if they’re shared and acted upon. Regularly share the findings from your VoC data with key stakeholders within your business. This ensures everyone is up-to-date and can all work together to make informed decisions to improve the customer experience.
Insights are equally useless unless they drive change. You need to make sure you implement actionable strategies based on your findings or all that VoC data collection will have been a waste.
Whether it’s tweaking a process, creating a new training program, or shaking up your product, taking action shows your customers that their feedback matters. While this may seem obvious, 38% of companies collect customer feedback and do nothing with it, while another 36% analyze it and never act on it.
The right tools can make or break your data collection, which means you need the right software to support your VoC program and follow the best practices we’ve discussed.
You’ll need tools that can:
Without these solutions, you won’t be able to fully grasp how your customers really feel.
Implementing a voice of the customer program can significantly boost your contact center’s performance but it does come with its own challenges. Addressing these issues before they get out of hand is essential to getting the most out of your VoC data. Let’s tackle them.
Implementing a voice of the customer (VoC) program within your contact center is not as easy as adding some new tech and rolling it out to your agents. Collecting personal data about your customers means you need to respect their right to privacy and the safety of their data, including through governmental regulation.
Before collecting any customer data, it’s crucial to obtain explicit consent. Clearly communicating the purpose of data collection and how it’ll be used is ideal. This transparency will build trust with your customer base and encourage more honest and constructive feedback. Without consent, you risk damaging your reputation as a brand, the trust you’ve built with your customers, and possibly legal repercussions.
To protect customer privacy, you need to both anonymize and aggregate data whenever possible. Anonymization removes any identifiable information to safeguard their identities, while aggregation combines individual data points to provide broader insights without exposing their personal details.
Finally, it’s crucial that you adhere to—and respect—government regulations like GDPR or CCPA. These laws are designed to protect consumer rights and data privacy. Staying compliant with them helps you avoid glaring legal issues and helps reinforce your commitment to ethical standards, and the rights of your customers.
Your customers are the most important aspect of your business, which means their thoughts and opinions hold a significant amount of weight. Factoring in the voice of the customer (VoC) can boost your overall customer experience, improve agent performance and engagement, and significantly contribute to growth.
Getting the most out of your VoC data—and the rest of the data your call center collects—is vital to that growth.
Using Scorebuddy can help you peel apart the layers of your data and find out exactly what your customers are feeling, and how you can improve.
With powerful features like GenAI auto scoring, custom scorecards, personalized agent dashboards, and integrated business intelligence, Scorebuddy helps you to get the full picture of your call center.
Sign up for a free demo today and see how Scorebuddy can harness the power of your contact center data.
