Voice of the Customer (VOC): Benefits and Best Practices for Contact Centers

You already know that delivering consistently great experience to your customers is crucial to success in any industry. But, as customer expectations continue to evolve, understanding what customers want and need from your contact center can be complex.

Simply analyzing common contact center metrics like average handling times (AHT) won’t show you if you have what it takes to engage and retain customers. You need to go a step further, and actively listen to the “Voice of the Customer” (VOC).  

Collecting direct insights into the experiences customers have with your business through surveys, feedback requests, and even sentiment analysis shows you how to develop stronger, more lucrative bonds with customers, optimize processes, and drive business growth. 

Here, we’ll introduce the benefits of VOC programs, and share the best practices you can use to unlock the full benefits of listening to your customers. 

What is Voice of the Customer (VOC)? 

Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a term used to describe how companies collect and analyze direct feedback from customers about their experiences with and expectations of your brand. A VOC program focuses on capturing deeper insights into how customers feel about your business, product, or service, offering the data you need to drive growth. 

By listening to the voice of the customer, companies ensure they can better understand and meet customer needs. VOC programs can surface valuable data your company can use to identify customer preferences, eliminate pain points, and optimize contact center performance.  

The Importance of Voice of the Customer Insights 

Quantitative data about call abandonment rates, customer wait times, and average handle times can only tell you so much about your customers’ experiences with your company. Without clear insights and feedback from your customers, it’s harder to identify why they remain loyal to your brand, why they choose to switch to competitors, and what influences their purchasing decisions. 

With VOC, you build on your quantitative data with more information about your customers, ensuring you can not only improve the customer experience, but create products and services tuned to customer needs, and increase buyer retention levels.  

Voice of the Customer Insights can even help improve agent performance, by providing insights that help you to train your teams to be more effective and productive. Plus, it can help you make better decisions about how to route and manage queries in your contact center. 

How to Access VOC Insights in the Contact Center 

Though “Voice of the Customer” programs aren’t entirely new, they have grown increasingly important in recent years, as consumers demand more personalized, relevant experiences from every brand. Every consumer wants to feel heard and respected by their favorite brands. 

As demand for VOC insights grows, so does the number of tools and solutions companies can use to collect feedback. Aside from conducting extensive interviews with customer groups, or focus groups, businesses can also leverage: 

Automated post-call survey tools

Using automated solutions integrated with the contact center, companies can immediately administer simple surveys to customers on a range of channels. These surveys offer access to data companies can use to calculate Net Promoter Scores, analyze Customer Satisfaction Rates, and track common customer concerns.

IVR systems

Intelligent IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems aren’t just becoming more effective at enabling self-service in the contact center. They’re also empowering teams to collect data and feedback from customers at the end of each call. AI systems can automatically ask questions about the customer’s experience, or ask them to rate their service experience on a scale of one to five. 

Speech analytics

With intelligent conversational AI solutions, companies don’t even have to ask how a customer is feeling to get an insight into their current state. AI tools can monitor a person’s sentiment throughout their customer journey, gathering insights from their tone of voice, the words they use, and even their speech cadence. 

CRM solutions

With CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, companies can create comprehensive customer profiles, capturing data from multiple touchpoints to learn more about each buyer’s preferences and pain points. CRM solutions integrated with your contact center can unify data collected from surveys, feedback requests, conversation recordings and more. 

The Key Benefits of Voice of the Customer Insights 

Your customers’ opinions matter. Studies show that 94% of customers say they’re likely to purchase more from companies that receive good feedback from other buyers. Capturing the Voice of the Customer through post-call surveys, IVR surveys, and contact center analytics helps you keep your finger on the pulse of what customers really think about your business.  

The benefits of this approach are numerous, but perhaps the three biggest advantages are: 

Improved Customer Satisfaction and Retention 

Listening to your customers with VOC insights is how you make sure you understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. The information you gather from customers will help you to determine how to produce higher quality products and services, as well as how to optimize the performance of your contact center, based on customer needs and pain points. 

You can even enhance self-service experiences, by embedding answers to commonly asked questions into your website or IVR system. By offering more intuitive, personalized, and relevant experiences to customers, you increase your chances of both converting buyers and retaining their loyalty. Plus, the information you gather about what causes customers to churn (or abandon your business), can help you implement more effective retention strategies.  

Enhanced Agent Engagement and Performance 

Employees need to understand how their behaviors and actions impact customers, to ensure they can deliver exceptional experiences.  

When you provide your agents with real-time insights into what customers feel during their journey, they can use that information to improve their performance. You can even use AI-powered tools to deliver real-time coaching based on what you know about customers or real-time sentiment analysis insights.  

Plus, VOC insights give you the data you need to develop stronger training, coaching, and development opportunities for your agents. Embedding what you learn into your training strategies can help you to boost employee engagement and retention.  

Greater Operational Efficiency 

Voice of the Customer data can also help you to streamline and optimize your contact center operations. With the right insights, you can identify recurring issues and inefficiencies with your internal processes and use that information to correct and improve those processes. 

For instance, if your data shows that customers frequently complain about long wait times, you could consider implementing new self-service solutions for your buyers or updating your routing strategies to accelerate call handling times.  

If you learn that customers are more likely to stay with your business if they receive proactive onboarding materials and guides after making a purchase, you can create automated workflows that deliver those resources to your buyers. 

Best Practices: Tips for Leveraging VOC Effectively

An effective VOC program can significantly improve customer satisfaction and retention rates, improve operational efficiency, and offer access to valuable insights for growth. However, you need to ensure you’re implementing your strategy correctly. Here are our top best practices for success. 

1. Set Objectives for your VOC Program 

A powerful VOC program will help you to answer questions about how you can improve customer experiences, increase loyalty, and reduce operational costs. Before you start collecting feedback with IVR survey tools or automated forms, ask yourself what you really need to learn more about. 

Are you trying to find out why customers abandon calls without speaking to an agent? Do you want to know what you can do to convince customers to stay with your business for longer?  

Identifying goals for your VOC strategy will help you to determine which questions you should be asking, such as: 

• How happy were you with the level of support you received today? 
• Would you have preferred to contact us on a different channel? 
• What convinced you to make this purchasing decision? 

2. Take an Omnichannel Approach 

Customers aren’t just connecting with companies through phone calls and emails anymore. They’re leveraging various channels, from voice to social media. If you serve customers on a range of channels, your VOC program should take an omnichannel approach too. Make sure you’re requesting feedback via: 

• Voice: Using IVR surveys 
• Chat apps: Using chatbots or automated survey requests. 
• Email: With automated surveys 
• Social media: With chatbots and social listening tools 

3. Design Surveys Carefully

Whether they’re delivered automatically via email, chat, or your IVR system, surveys are among the best ways to collect in-depth data from your target audience. However, most customers will be reluctant to complete surveys that are long, complicated, or vague.  

When designing surveys to collect VOC insights, focus on: 

• Brevity: You’ll likely get more responses to short surveys that ask quick, simple questions, such as “How would you rate your service on a scale of one to ten?”  
• Specificity: Specific questions will often lead to more valuable insights. Instead of asking, “are you happy with your service”, ask “what did you appreciate most about today’s call?” 
• Convenience: Make it easy for customers to complete the survey on the channel of their choice, in the shortest time possible.  

4. Take Advantage of Automation

One major issue with collecting VOC insights, is that it can be difficult for employees to actually remember to ask for feedback at the end of an interaction with a customer. Your team members are trying to move rapidly from one customer to the next, which means tasks like asking for a review or rating can often fall through the cracks.  

With that in mind, take advantage of automation to help you scale your data collection efforts. Add automatic survey requests into your IVR workflows or create email and messaging campaigns that automatically ask for feedback when customers finish a call or make a purchase. 

5. Unlock the Power of AI

Like automation, AI has the potential to significantly improve your VOC program. AI-powered tools can help you automatically collect deeper insights from customer interactions. For instance, ice Contact Center AI tools from ComputerTalk can analyze a customer’s sentiment on multiple channels instantly, examining tone, word choice and more. 

AI solutions like chatbots and virtual assistants can also request feedback on the behalf of agents, and even improve your data analysis strategy. By analyzing historical recordings and real-time interactions, AI tools can help you detect high-risk customers who are likely to abandon your business and offer insights into how to improve customer experiences. 

6. Use VOC in your Training Strategies 

As mentioned above, Voice of the Customer insights and contact center analytics are powerful tools for boosting employee performance and productivity. Using the insights you gather from surveys and reviews, you can create more effective, tailored training strategies, focusing on improving specific skills in team members, like empathy or communication skills. 

With dashboards offering quick insights into each employee’s customer satisfaction score rating or the sentiment of the customers they serve, you can empower team members to identify their strengths and weaknesses, so they can invest in their own training strategies. 

You can even use VOC information to enhance real-time coaching and training support offered by virtual assistants and AI agents in your contact center. 

7. Remember Data Privacy 

Implementing a VOC program is all about finding ways to collect as much valuable data from your target audience as possible. However, it’s important to remember that the information you collect still needs to be protected.  

When you’re using call recordings, sentiment analysis, and automated tools to collect feedback from customers, ensure you’re storing that data in the right place, and implementing robust security measures. It’s also worth taking steps to redact any particularly sensitive data (such as credit card details or full names) from your records before you use them for training purposes. 

8. Constantly Act on your Insights 

Finally, listening to your customers is only the first step. Once you gather the right insights, you need to figure out how to act on them to improve your contact center’s performance. Aside from using data to inform your training strategies, think about how you can leverage VOC insights to: 

• Optimize product and service design, based on what you know about customer priorities, pain points and expectations. 
• Eliminate contact center issues, such as long wait times, or high transfer rates, with intelligent routing and state-of-the-art technology.  
• Improve self-service with more comprehensive FAQs, guides, and onboarding materials, or well-trained chatbots.  
• Increase conversion and retention rates with personalized marketing and sales strategies, informed by customer profiles and segments.  

Tune into the Voice of your Customer 

Listening to the voice of the customer has never been more important. As customer expectations continue to evolve, paying attention to what customers genuinely think and feel about your company is critical to staying one step ahead of the competition.  

Use VOC insights correctly, and you’ll improve customer loyalty, enhance team performance, reduce operational costs, and boost your future growth potential.  

Find out how you can tune into the voice of your customer with surveys, intelligent IVR systems, AI, and sentiment analysis today, with ComputerTalk. Contact us to request a free demo of our cutting-edge contact center solutions.