If your customers are not responding to post-call surveys, how will you know how they feel about your contact center? Understanding your Voice of the Customer (VoC) is essential to improving contact center operations.
MiaRec supports contact centers with Voice Analytics and Quality Management solutions to drive VoC strategy. We believe that contact centers need more than just post-call surveys to understand their customers.
In this article, we will dive deep into how Voice Analytics solutions can help you better understand your Voice of the Customer. You will learn why post-call surveys are less effective, especially when compared to Sentiment and Topics Analysis. By the end of this article, you will learn how incorporating Voice Analytics into your VoC strategy can strengthen customer experiences, streamline business workflows, and more.
What Is The Voice Of The Customer?
Your Voice of the Customer, or VoC, is how your customers feel about your organization and its products and services. It is how you gather, analyze, and use customer data to understand your customers’ expectations, preferences, and experiences. An effective VoC strategy should be providing quality customer interactions through agent interactions, surveys, and more.
Why Should I Invest In My VoC Strategy?
Organizations are accumulating more data than ever, but over 90% of IT, data science, and data engineering professionals are struggling to present their data in an analyzable format.
You could be using your data to identify how customers are feeling about a specific product or service and understand how you could improve to meet customer expectations. Organizations that prioritize CX personalization see up to a 15% increase in revenue.
Investing in your VoC strategy means using your untapped customer data to stand out from the competition. Your contact center should be able to gather feedback from every point of their journey and turn it into actionable insights. By listening to your VoC, you can provide products and services that customers want and need.
With the right VoC strategy, you should be able to build personalized marketing campaigns, improve customer service, develop better products, and more. It shows that your organization is willing to listen and adapt to customer input, building customer trust and loyalty.
Why Are Post-Call Surveys Not Good Enough?
Post-call surveys are not an effective way of understanding your VoC. Because they need customers to fill them out, they only represent a small sample size and do not accurately reflect how most of your customers feel about your organization.
It is difficult to accurately understand your VoC with just traditional methods such as post-call surveys. Once a customer finishes a call, why should they stay on to answer a survey? Customers often do not have much incentive to finish a post-call survey, and oftentimes how customers feel at the end of a call does not accurately represent how they felt during the call.
Post-call surveys are a way for contact centers to collect customer feedback. Traditionally, contact centers automatically reach out to a customer after they’ve spoken with a live agent and ask them to answer or fill out a post-call survey on their call experience.
There are two popular post-call survey types: Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys. NPS is a metric that tracks how likely a customer is to promote or recommend your brand, while CSAT would focus on determining whether the customer was satisfied with the phone call itself.
Regardless of what post-call survey type you choose, customers are unlikely to answer. In fact, some reports show that post-call feedback rates are drastically low, with responses dropping from 20% to 5% in recent years.
Image: A graph from Pew Research Center on telephone surveys conducted in 1997-2018. While this graph focuses on telephone polling, post-call surveys across most mediums have been historically low.
When customers have only a 5% likelihood of responding to a post-call survey, this means there is drastic room for improvement in how you gather customer feedback.
Investing in New Voice Analytics Solutions
Voice Analytic solutions are offering new and effective ways of gathering customer input. Most contact centers today are multichannel contact centers that offer several, different communication checkpoints such as live agents, social media, or emails. While online self-service, chatbots, and AI assistants are valuable communication tools, customers still rely on live agents to answer more complicated questions.
Businesses tend to overestimate how effective online assistants and chatbots are on their own. In fact, 52% of surveyed respondents indicated they want to speak to a live agent when facing a problem with a product or service. Companies that try to decrease their live agents' availability often lower customer satisfaction rates.
Live agent interactions are key to understanding your Voice of the Customer as they provide a great opportunity to gather a more nuanced understanding of your customers. Voice Analytics solutions offer tools such as Sentiment Analysis, Topic Analysis, and Automatic Keyword Spotting so that you can understand what is being discussed during calls, how customers feel during the call, and how they feel about your organization.
Most contact centers will offer rule-based or Natural Language Processing-based (NLP-based) Sentiment Analysis. We recommend NLP-based Sentiment Analysis because it offers a more nuanced analysis than rule-based sentiment analysis.
We will be using MiaRec’s Topic and NLP-based Sentiment Analysis to help demonstrate how you can analyze calls to understand your Voice of Customer.
MiaRec Topic Analysis categorizes calls by customizable keywords and key phrases. By categorizing calls, you gain the ability to identify patterns when customers contact you regarding specific issues, products, or services. This feature makes it easier for you to extract meaningful insights from your call data.
Screenshot of MiaRec Topic Analysis displaying different Topic examples
Contact centers can use MiaRec Sentiment Analysis as a real-time survey. It uses NLP-based sentiment analysis to gauge customer satisfaction and grades whether a call was positive or negative.
Screenshot of MiaRec Sentiment Analysis displaying call scores.
For example, you could set up a specific Topic to track how many customers were calling about a new product. You could then use Sentiment Analysis to review these calls and get insight into how customers feel about the product. These insights could be used to improve the product or tailor a service to better meet customer needs.
You can also use Topic and Sentiment Analysis to resolve issues before customer churn increases. By using Topic and Sentiment Analysis to track website bugs, shipping delays, and more, you can catch potential warning signs before they grow into bigger problems.
Providing good customer service is essential. Up to 95% of consumers are likely to recommend your company to a friend or relative if they have a very good customer experience. You can use Topic and Sentiment Analysis to track how your agents are interacting with customers. You can also use Topic Analysis to see if agents are struggling with a call due to a lack of knowledge. These insights can help contact center managers provide personalized agent training, improving customer interactions.
Alternatively, some Voice Analytic solutions also offer Auto Call Scoring so that you can automatically grade agent calls based on your set criteria. This is another method you can use to accurately measure agent performance.
These are only some of the examples of how Topics and Sentiment Analysis can help you better understand your VoC. The key highlight of Topics and Sentiment Analysis is that it analyzes all of your agents calls. Unlike post-call surveys where only a few customers will respond, you will have a more comprehensive understanding of your entire customer base with Topics and Sentiment Analysis.
By making changes to products or services according to customer feedback, you are showing that you are willing to listen to your customers. This makes it easier for customers to feel as though they can trust you, building customer loyalty and decreasing customer churn.
Conclusion: Ensuring Your Contact Center Understands Your Customers
Rather than solely relying on post-call feedback surveys, you can take advantage of Voice Analytics solutions to better understand your VoC. By investing in a Voice Analytics solution, you can better extract meaningful customer insights that will empower your organization with better customer experiences, data-driven business decisions, and more.
What Contact Center Solution Is Right For My VoC Strategy?
Contact center solutions can help you keep up with customer expectations, but you need to consider what kind of contact center solution is right for you. What specific pain points are you trying to target?
Check to see if a Voice Analytics solution is offering NLP-based or rule-based Sentiment Analysis. NLP-based Sentiment Analysis will provide more detailed call insights, making it a better choice for your VoC strategy. Some Voice Analytic solutions also include additional Quality Management services to streamline agent workflows. Other Voice Analytics solutions may offer more effective data redaction services, which can be great if you are prioritizing data compliance. Check out our related resources to see how different contact center solutions can improve your VoC strategy.
Related resources:
- What Is The Difference Between WFO, WFM, WEM, Conversation Intelligence & More
- Top 6 Topic Analysis Use Cases For Any Contact Center
- Maximizing The ROI Of Contact Center Voice Analytics: Top 5 Use Cases [Incl. Videos]
- What Are The Best Contact Center As A Service (CCaaS) Solutions For Your Contact Center?
An effective VoC strategy means you have a deep understanding for your customer’s needs, preferences, and expectations. You should be able to use Voice Analytic solutions to gather customer insights that will drive agent performances, customer experiences, and business decisions. Ultimately, knowing your VoC is key to your company’s success.
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