Voice of the Customer(VoC), our path to Active Insight

In our quest to providing an effective tech support environment to provide a superlative customer experience, it is vital to understand the opinions that our actual and potential customers express in new channels that are much more spontaneous and less structured than the traditional surveys. The reach, the immediacy and the “emotional” aspect (Yeah, it’s all about emotional intelligence, right?) of these channels make them an impressive source of raw materials for obtaining valuable insights that can then be correlated with the traditional data collected at the tech support centre.

For this very reason, businesses are expanding their VoC initiatives towards that new territory, with active analytics on unsolicited and unstructured comments that is derived out of contact centre interactions (voice, email and chat), Social Media conversations, Blogs and News, Comments from forums and third party sites. Gartner defines customer experience (CX) 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 products¹. Customer experience is increasingly the single most important factor determining competitive advantage and differentiation for many organizations². According to Gartner, while 95% of such companies surveyed collect customer feedback, only 5% close the loop by letting participants know what was done based on their feedback³.

By incorporating analytics around VoC program to provide active insights, businesses can not only improve their customer experience but their bottom line as well. A sound analytics framework around tech support (capable to handle big data & analytics) can ensure businesses benefit from the massive and quick treatment of unstructured information provided by text mining and sentiment analysis technologies. The end goal is to extract the meaning from all the customer interactions correlating to their products/services/markets.

With VoC, our core focus should be on aggregating such data collected on three main dimensions:

• Customer – eg: Detect support request patterns, identify the stage of “customer journey”, detect churn and other potential risks, identify influencers, promoters and detractors, engage customers and proactively manage conversation
• Product/Service – eg: Generate insights around problem/customer, solution/product or service dimensions. Generate ideas for new offerings, identify existing issues and missing features in their product/service offerings, assess customer satisfaction and compare against competition
• Business – eg: Aggregate public opinion and media coverage around predefined variables that have an impact on business reputation (one eg: CSS Corp Analytics during one such exercise for one of our clients, identified negative sentiments around product usability correlating to customer attrition around the same timeline). This help business to act upon such leading indicators and rebuild its brand with its existing customers and general public.

A trusted tech support partner can play a big role in bringing about this awareness and then, using analytics to provide active insights on the goldmine of data you are sitting on. Such a tech support partner will help businesses build a defensible advantage in delivering superlative customer experience. These encounters lead your business to top line growth, profitability and improved customer loyalty.

¹ Lessons From 10 Consumer Brands Cited for Outstanding’ Customer Experience in U.S., Gartner, 2014

² Alcatel-Lucent customer experience survey, 2012

³ Customer Experience Management: Raising Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty and Advocacy – Gartner

Make Big Data a BIG part of your business plan

The data derived from a normal customer interaction can vary in significance across various levels. It can be hugely insightful, or just about data as is. The tragedy is, tech support teams almost always fail to see its significance in the scheme of things. The data is collated and stored, sometimes even organised and formatted, but still not used for insights. With effective technologies, tools and processes available, where is the disconnect? The shortfall has to be in the awareness of the people. They, more often than not, do not realise it would be a colossal waste not to derive market insights from it.

Most enterprises as a whole do not realise the impact this goldmine of data can have on their market positioning, strategies and even growth plans. The right data that can help derive the smartest insights is priceless. But that can happen only when the awareness of its criticality and utility in context of the business plans, is spread company wide.

Using customer insights derived from the available Big data also needs thought leadership championing. The business plans that are formed at leadership level, need the strategies to also come from the top. So it is the leadership team that needs to ensure the awareness of how significant Big data is for their business goals, becomes a company-wide goal. It is also their duty to ensure that a roadmap is created for how this resource can be used to help the company get where it should be. Every single person in the enterprise needs to be aware of the roadmap, and the role Big data can play in it. Big Data Analytics thus, needs to be incorporated into the organisational processes, and the approach needs to be top down. The flow of information for making it a part of every strategy and decision making process needs to come down from the leadership teams.

Thereafter, the second level of disconnect lies in the failure to make the data available across the teams that can actually use it as a business tool. Sitting in silos at the customer end of the process, it really serves no purpose. That dormant state can be remedied, but only after widespread awareness of its importance is created across the enterprise. The information needs to be then withdrawn from silos where it resides, and given the treatment of any other decision making tool. It needs to be led by a well defined enterprise strategy.

To get maximum benefits, enterprises have to understand the need to develop tools and frameworks that will help get data out of these silos, on a connected platform, making it available for insightful decision taking across the enterprise. Awareness of its utility needs to be the first step in this process. A trusted tech support partner can play a big role in bringing about this awareness and then, using it to leverage the goldmine of data you are sitting on.