Top 5 Ways Voice of Customer Improves Your Contact Center
Top 5 Ways Voice of the Customer Improves Your Contact Center
How to leverage VoC to deliver positive business impact
The Great Contact Center CX Opportunity
The benefits of a superior customer experience are now widely accepted. But how do you ensure you cash in?
Customer loyalty is declining…and will continue to fall if current trends persist
You are now competing in a hyper-competitive environment where your customers are less forgiving and have more choice than they've ever had before. So how do you stand out?
Customers who have been using existing product/service provider for three years or more by age
Source: Verint/Opinium1 . Download this research now.
Customers are becoming evermore likely to change who they spend their hard-earned dollars with. And this is a trend that is gaining momentum at a faster rate than most could possibly imagine.
According to our recent study, 61% of customers globally had been using existing product/service providers for three years or more in 2015. By 2018, this same figure was 51%2. This is simply your new reality.
For this reason, the experience you deliver to your customers is now absolutely critical. One false step and they move onto a competitor.
This is especially true in the contact center, which provides a significant challenge but also offers a fantastic opportunity to stand out.
Are you finding customer retention increasingly difficult?
The Contact Center CX Opportunity
“While many firms say that they want to differentiate based on customer experience, few have a definitive contact center strategy to accomplish this.”
Forrester7
Your contact center is at the heart of your customer experience and has the capacity to make or break it.
Due to the ever growing influence of digital, however, there is some uncertainty about its role and importance, with 41% of business leaders facing challenges in showcasing the benefits of contact centers.5
But – as detailed elsewhere in this eBook – the reality is that your contact center represents a superb opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competition. So how do you improve contact center CX in a way that impacts key metrics and drives positive business outcomes?
This eBook explains how listening, analyzing and acting on your contact center VoC can be the catalyst for great CX, which in turn powers major improvements across five commonly-used metrics to deliver tangible bottom-line results.
How would you rate your contact center CX?
VoC Impact 1: First Call Resolution (FCR)
FCR is all about meeting customer need to provide a fulfilling and satisfactory experience. Your VoC – by its very nature – provides a deep insight into this need.
What is it and why is it important?
Typically calculated as a percentage figure, FCR is the ability to properly address each individual customer’s need the first time they call. These customers therefore have no cause to call you again, meaning reduced call volumes and improved overall satisfaction.
How can VoC make the difference?
What causes your customers to call your contact center? What expectations do they have when they do? Why are these expectations sometimes not met?
All these questions can be answered with a robust VoC program that captures what your customers really think about the experience you deliver. In short: your FCR is an indicator while your VoC is the diagnosis, providing the “why” required to drive improvement.
What VoC tactics should I use?
Post-interaction surveys – completed via IVR technology or following an emailed or SMS invitation – provide great insight into both your ability to deliver FCR and how you can improve it. Typically, your customers will readily explain the specifics around your failure to deliver their desired outcome, a crucial layer of context to drive meaningful and impactful change.
Tying this insight to targeted operational information (e.g. workforce optimization quality and performance management data) on specific interactions provides an extremely powerful layer of context. This allows you to gain a deep understanding on agent, team and organization-wide performance and diagnose the issues underpinning this.
Armed with this information, you can then implement structural and individual improvements - such as agent coaching and training, assigning your resources more effectively and so on - to enhance your CX and improve your FCR rates.
VoC Impact 2: Customer Effort
VoC enables you to understand why and how you fail to deliver against your customers’ requirements and expectations. Act on this information to drive improvements that reduce customer effort and maximize business performance.
What is it and why is it important?
Customer effort is the ease with which your customers are able to achieve their intended task. While similar to FCR on some level, it is more specifically aligned with more direct material business outcomes (e.g. a purchase, account sign-up etc.) across different channels.
Many companies consider a Customer Effort Score (CES) a vital measure as it’s been proven to be a strong indicator of future purchase behavior and referral likelihood. This stems from the idea that “wowing your customers” isn’t what moves the needle, it’s simply making it easier to achieve their desired outcome.
How can VoC make the difference?
First of all, your VoC strategy is likely to incorporate some way of capturing a customer effort measure. For example, a typical CES is calculated by asking your customers a question such as “Did we/contact center agent make it easy for you to handle your issue today?”.
Depending on how you ask the question, your VoC provides insight into the entire experience you delivered to that customer. Did they start on your website, chat with your AI bot and then call your contact center when they couldn’t find their answers there? It can also provide the vital context behind that journey. What was it about your website and chat services that meant you didn’t deliver as required there?
Putting your omnichannel and cross-channel journeys to one side, your VoC also provides key insight into your contact center’s ability to meet customer expectations. Understand why and how you fail to deliver against your customers’ requirements, then act on this information to drive improvements that affect your customer effort score and business performance.
What VoC tactics should I use?
Emailed or IVR-based post-interaction surveys are the primary method used to capture a customer effort measure and understand the reasoning behind this. This insight-rich unstructured verbatim feedback data enables you to understand and establish the key drivers of customer emotion in the context of specific agent behaviors and customers' experience.
However, digital feedback captured across mobile and web-based channels provides an extra layer of diagnostic insight about your entire experience. When given the opportunity, your customers will vent about your contact center, your website, your live chat service and any other channel that you operate.
Brought together, this is key information that can spur CX improvements that significantly reduce customer effort.
Consumers increasingly demand quicker and easier access to accurate information and empathetic agents. If their first point of contact is web-based, they expect agents to understand their experience in that channel…VoC vendors can readily add customer effort questions — such as “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?” — to their surveys for one perspective on effort.
Forrester9
VoC Impact 3: Customer Churn
How does a customer become a brand loyalist, returning again and again? How do you create brand advocates? Your VoC enables you to get to the bottom of these questions and more - critical insight to driving customer retention.
What is it and why is it important?
Customer churn is the rate at which you lose your existing customers. This is a particularly important measure for member or account-driven businesses (e.g. banking, telecom, insurance etc.), while retailers would focus how frequently their customers purchase from them. Your ability to retain your customers has a huge impact on your success.
How can VoC make the difference?
With emotion a huge driver of loyalty, get to the bottom of this and you can have a huge impact on churn. Does your experience make your customers happy? Does it give them the warm and fuzzy? Or does it leave them feeling frustrated? Your VoC is designed to provide this exact type of insight across your entire contact center CX - from your self-service capability to agent interactions.
Second, your customers are attracted to easy, frictionless and convenient experiences. If you’re able to harness your VoC deliver on this, you will be far more likely to nurture repeat customers and minimize churn.
What VoC tactics should I use?
Whichever VoC method you use, allow your customers to tell you about their experience in their own words – be this through call logs, surveys or opt-in style feedback. As already noted, this type of unstructured VoC is key to revealing how your customers actually feel about their interactions with you. Isolating and analyzing VoC feedback from your members and account holders provides even more focused insight directly related to churn and loyalty.
With your contact center often a lightning rod for disappointing experiences throughout your CX enterprise, also look to share and extract VoC data across your organization. This enables you to not only improve contact center experience, it also offers valuable insight for and about other parts of your business.
Customer experience transformation efforts bring benefits like increased customer retention and greater cross-sell opportunity.
Forrester10
VoC Impact 4: Operating Costs
Harnessed correctly, your VoC is key to understanding and implementing an effective cost vs quality contact center strategy.
“Combining customer feedback with additional data, such as contact outcomes and operational data, provides a more complete picture of contact center performance.”
Forrester11
What is it and why is it important?
Operational costs are the overheads associated with running your contact center. Driving efficiencies without compromising quality is something management constantly wrestles with. Strike the right balance, however, and you deliver maximum value to the business.
How can VoC make the difference?
It helps you pinpoint specific opportunities for implementing cost savings while offering clarity on the associated pitfalls. When do you need fewer operatives? Where could technology be better employed to reduce costs?
What VoC tactics should I use?
Combine VoC insight collected from post-call IVR, email and SMS surveys with standard contact center operational data. Understand, for example, when you get your most negative and positive comments and then draw on customer feedback to understand why. Continuously analyze and assess existing operational processes in the context of what you discover.
Then improve, optimize and evolve assisted and self-service contact center models to reduce your operating costs and lower your cost to serve.
VoC Impact 5: Revenue
Great VoC programs ultimately lead to great CX and customer centric organizations. With these key qualities in turn having a demonstrable impact on revenue, your Voice of Customer strategies have a crucial role in helping you achieve these broader organizational goals.
What is it and why is it important?
At the risk of stating the obvious, revenue is a key metric. It’s a measure of great interest to staff, management, executives, investors, the media and more as it’s a clear determinant of growth and success.
Many studies have proven the relationship between CX and revenue. For example, Forrester claims that the revenue impact of just a single point improvement in its CX score results in a revenue increase of $332m for upscale hotel chains, $281m for wireless service providers, $244m for big box retailers, $214m for auto and home insurance providers and $119m for traditional retail banks.12
How can VoC make the difference?
Great VoC programs are the catalyst for CX optimization and consequently revenue growth. Why? Your customers are the ones that live the experience you provide day in, day out. So listening, analyzing and acting on the crucial insight they provide is a logical step to continued improvement.
Take self-service as an example. According to Aberdeen, best-in-class contact centers resolve the overwhelming majority of inquiries via this method and consequently generate 4.4 times greater revenue growth as a result.14 Without your VoC to help you understand exactly what is and isn’t working about your self-service processes, how can you expect to elevate them to this best-in-class level?
What VoC tactics should I use?
Any tactic that enables you to efficiently improve your contact center CX at scale. Critical to this process, you should prioritize and target the improvements you make for maximum bottom line impact. Ideally, quantifying the value of any issue effecting your customer experience should also be an important part of this process.
While Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an important metric in its own right, incorporating this measure into your VoC analysis provides excellent guidance on how to focus your action for increased revenue. NPS is, after all, all about likelihood to recommend. Implement this measure and the accompanying feedback you receive into your post-contact surveys or whatever other listening method you use.
Bringing this VoC insight together and then combining it with workforce optimization data on specific interactions enables you to drive focused structural changes that really impact company revenue.
Those who are successful in improving the customer, employee and user experiences are being disproportionately rewarded. And those who are missing the mark are being disproportionately punished.
Gartner13
ADDITIONAL ANALYST INSIGHT: Watch this on-demand webcast featuring Gartner analyst Jim Davies to find out how to implement VoC programs that result in improved CX and greater revenue
Do you map your customer experience to company revenue?
References
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Defining the Human Age: A Reflection on Customer Service in 2030, Verint & Opinium Research LLP, January 2018; https://www.verint.com/defining-the-human-age/us/index.html
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Defining the Human Age: A Reflection on Customer Service in 2030, Verint & Opinium Research LLP, January 2018; https://www.verint.com/defining-the-human-age/us/index.html
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Forrester analysis of US Securities and Exchange Commission filings from 2010 to 2015 referenced in Harley Manning and Rick Parrish, Improving CX Through Business Discipline Drives Growth, June 19 2017, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/Improving+CX+Through+Business+Discipline+Drives+Growth/-/E-RES137906
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Forrester analysis of US Securities and Exchange Commission filings from 2010 to 2015 referenced in Harley Manning and Rick Parrish, Improving CX Through Business Discipline Drives Growth, June 19 2017, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/Improving+CX+Through+Business+Discipline+Drives+Growth/-/E-RES137906
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“Is Your Digital Transformation Strategy Driving Seamless Customer Journeys?”, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Contact Solutions, April 2017
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“Is Your Digital Transformation Strategy Driving Seamless Customer Journeys?”, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Contact Solutions, April 2017
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Art Schoeller and Randy Heffner, Design Your Contact Center To Be Customer-Centric: Strategic Plan: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook, August 31, 2017; https://www.forrester.com/report/Design+Your+Contact+Center+To+Be+CustomerCentric/-/E-RES78901
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Jim Davies, How to Measure the ROI of a Voice of the Customer Program, Gartner Research Inc., April 30 2018; https://www.gartner.com/doc/3873400
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Art Schoeller, Refine The Source of Truth In Your Contact Center To Improve Performance: Performance Management: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook, Forrester Research Inc., May 1, 2018; https://www.forrester.com/report/Refine+The+Source+Of+Truth+In+Your+Contact+Center+To+Improve+Performance/-/E-RES115987
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Dylan Czarnecki and Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, The ROI Of CX Transformation: The Business Case Report In The CX Transformation Playbook, Forrester Research Inc., June 19; https://www.forrester.com/report/The+ROI+Of+CX+Transformation/-/E-RES136233
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Art Schoeller, Refine The Source of Truth In Your Contact Center To Improve Performance: Performance Management: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook, Forrester Research Inc., May 1, 2018; https://www.forrester.com/report/Refine+The+Source+Of+Truth+In+Your+Contact+Center+To+Improve+Performance/-/E-RES115987
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Forrester Data Customer Experience Index Online Survey, US Consumers 2017 referenced in Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, Dylan Czarnecki, and Laura Garvin Tramm, Drive Business Growth With Great Customer Experience, 2017: The Upside of Investing in CX For 17 Industries, October 12, 2017, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/Drive+Business+Growth+With+Great+Customer+Experience+2017/-/E-RES137327
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Gartner, Future of Experience: A Gartner Theme Insight Report, Ed Thompson, Augie Ray, Lisa Callinan, Jessica Ekholm, Helen Poitevin & Magnus Revang, 05 May 2017, https://www.gartner.com/doc/3698955
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Omer Minkara, Self-Service: Maximize Business Results by Helping Customers Help Themselves, Aberdeen Research, February 2016; http://www.aberdeen.com/research/11925/rr-self-service/content.aspx
