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Putting the Voice of Your Customers to Work for You

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In an extremely informative webinar entitled Putting the Voice of the Customer to Work for You, Gartner and Verint share the key components of a successful customer experience program. The speakers include Ed Thompson, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner; Jim Davies, Research Director, Gartner; and Ryan Hollenbeck, SVP, Verint Systems.

Gartner and Verint’s experts agree that today’s successful organizations recognize it’s no longer enough to differentiate products and services on price alone – making the customer experience a key imperative. Therefore, understanding what the customer experience entails, how it will be approached, and which groups in the organization will lead the effort are critical issues that must be addressed.

Gartner defines customer experience as “The customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, channels, systems or products.”

To tackle a customer experience initiative and ensure its success, Gartner has identified five key components. These include:

• Leadership and coordination – The head of customer experience is most often an appointed position; frequently, the position has line reporting into either marketing or customer service.
• Executive support – It’s important to find an executive at the Board level that takes the initiative seriously and supports the efforts of the person appointed to the position.
• Knowing your start point – Take an honest look at the organization’s customer experience status. This knowledge helps to determine first steps towards success.
• No silver bullets – There no silver bullets for customer experience initiatives! There won’t be one large program that solves all ills. Rather, it is a series of small fixes that will result in a changed culture.
• Metrics – These need to be coordinated with the overall goals of the program. The metrics will differ depending upon whether the goals are improved satisfaction, improved loyalty, higher retention or improving quality of a specific process. Again, there is not a “one size fits all” approach for customer experience.

Making Customer Experience a Priority

Senior executives should make customer experience a priority for two main reasons. First, customers have many choices and can change suppliers easily. Second, as it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate a business based solely upon price and product, businesses can differentiate themselves through a great customer experience.

The best approach for initiating an effort in this area is to follow this five-step process:

1. Audit the current customer experience – Which projects are in motion? What projects have just started? What is the purpose of the projects?
2. Collate the customer voice by getting one view of customer feedback – Where is feedback being collected? Has anyone collected all of the feedback into a single voice of the customer?
3. Secure regular executive focus – Is the head of customer experience reporting directly to the Board level? Is he or she able to tell a story that gives the Board a clear picture of what it is like to be a customer of that organization?
4. Move away from being a traffic warden – Are you moving toward being an advisor for the organization? Do you know which project will have the largest impact on the customer experience and are you focusing your attention on that?
5. Rotate the focus from department to department – Are you getting bogged down in one department? Or are you helping each department, rotating your focus about every 6 months?

After allowing for the five-step process above, any organization looking to optimize the customer experience must also consider three dimensions – before, during and after. Setting expectations is a key component to the “before” phase. The “during” is where you deliver the experience, and the “after” is where you collect feedback about the experience. Without collecting feedback, or hearing the voice of the customer, organizations do not know if the experience they are delivering is as it was intended and they don’t have the necessary information to continuously improve that experience.

Capturing the Voice of the Customer through Interaction Analytics

There are three broad categories of technologies that capture the voice of the customer: direct, indirect and inferred. Direct is where the customer is giving conscious feedback to the organization, typically through a survey or complaint. Indirect is where the customer is providing feedback about the organization, but it is not direct feedback to that organization. It’s about them, but not to them. This could include social media like Twitter or Facebook. The third category is the inferred area, where customers are not actually telling you something specifically, but it can be determined based on operational data associated with the experience. This could include IVR click stream, hold time, or any other operational data that gives clues to how the customer’s experience went.

Interaction analytics is a very powerful business solution that captures the customer voice across the direct, indirect and inferred categories. These include speech, text, emotion and sentiment, call flow, desktop activity and surveys. Insight can be captured from these solutions which automatically triggers some form of follow-up action. In the customer service environment, this technology can help identify opportunities that drive agent productivity, identify training issues, redefine processes, and other tactical and strategic initiatives. There are also benefits from the sales and marketing perspective as well as the customer provides feedback about the sales process and marketing campaigns.

Gartner’s perspective is that organizations should strive to obtain a single view of the customer voice spanning audio conversations, survey data, social dialogs and other currently siloed channels.

Contact Center Workforce Optimization (WFO)

Contact center workforce optimization (WFO) is the coming together of process-siloed, agent-centric technologies so that those technologies monitor agent conversations, deliver training, forecast, schedule staffing plans and provide performance metrics. Driving these functions centrally has tremendous business advantages. Also, when interaction analytics are embedded into WFO, all processes are super-charged with the intentional and integrated insights.

The contact center workforce optimization market is maturing rapidly. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, one in three contact centers will have a WFO deployment. Gartner also sees WFO moving strategically into other parts of the enterprise. Benefits of WFO in the front-office can also be seen by moving it into the back-office.

This excellent webinar concludes with a series of case studies with real-world examples of customer experience initiatives. In one of these case studies, VSP Vision Care found that through using workforce optimization they were able to save over $3 million in the first year by improving contact center hold times, CSR availability and shift scheduling. Other benefits included increasing customer satisfaction and gaining deeper insight into agent efficiency and productivity.

I suggest you take a moment to check out this Webinar, it is very informative about how put the voice of your customer to work for you!