CRM Meets the (New) Voice Of The Customer
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Aug 22, 2011
D. Daniel Ziv, Vice President, Customer Interaction Analytics, Verint Systems
The way voice of the customer (VOC) metrics are leveraged in today's enterprise is changing, creating opportunities for integration into traditional customer relationship management (CRM) strategies. Most CRM systems collect and report on structured socio-demographic and transactional customer data, such as past purchases. Few, however, manage to capture and integrate the different categories of customer voice – what customers are actually saying about your organization – into those systems.
With the proliferation of social media networks and other forms of non-traditional customer touch points, in addition to advances in unstructured mining technologies such as speech and text analytics, there is a surge of structured and unstructured data that can be categorized as representing the new voice of the customer.
The term "voice of the customer" has been used in many different contexts to mean different things. These VOC references generally fit into four key categories:
- Direct Structured: Closed Questions (Web, IVR, Email, Mail, POS)
- Direct Unstructured: Actual Voice and Text Interactions, Focus Groups
- Indirect Structured: Online Ratings, 3rd Party Survey
- Indirect Unstructured: Blogs, Social Media, Public Media, Word of Mouth
VOC data is much more accessible with today's tools, creating an opportunity for organizations to move beyond siloed thinking by formulating the right mix of these categories. For example: A national payment processing company, spending roughly $600,000 for speech analytics software created a $12.5 million return on investment. The organization captured and acted on direct unstructured VOC data by analyzing calls coming into its contact centers. In doing so, the system identified key words and phrases that were typically associated with customer conversations just prior to them terminating an account.
Taking that same VOC database, the payment processor ran automated searches for these indicative words and phrases in recorded interactions with existing customers to determine and flag those with a propensity for defection. After cross-correlating the customers' "value" through its CRM data, it established a process to proactively contact the most high value and "at risk" customers – saving more than 4500 accounts, which represented over $12.5 million in revenue since the project was deployed in mid-2009. These results were achieved because the company leveraged the rich unstructured voice data in tandem with its CRM data to tap into and act on the real voice of its customers.
Now's the perfect time to take a look at your organization and the potential VOC options available to you. Technologies that mine unstructured VOC data, such as speech analytics and text analytics, are an ideal starting point, along with determining if you can integrate both structured and unstructured VOC data to help create a richer and more actionable customer relationship management strategy. Today’s organizations can no longer ignore VOC when developing or evolving CRM strategies if they hope to truly understand underlying consumer behavior and drivers of brand loyalty.