Voice of the Customer
Voice of the Customer
Many large enterprises and small companies would pay each year to hear what their customers are saying about them. In fact, many companies have instituted "voice of the customer" traditionally referred as customer feedback programs with dedicated resources in the effort to achieve this noble objective. The current trend is to allocate budget for the sole purpose of gathering feedback from customers via methods usually relying on the customer themselves as the source. Some have taken the bold step of changing their business model to "customer centric" in order to maximize their offerings according to the needs of their customers. Customers' needs should be captured using the aggregated approach regarding the customers' journey which include all touch points the customer choices. Customer calls, posts, chats, tweets and email are all rich with data for decisions about the experience. This data is useful for decisions in marketing, product/service concept and design to product/service delivery and support. It begs one to analyze the concept of the "voice of the customer" deeper studying background information, challenges, solutions, and benefits.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Customer journey has become complex and non-linear with unique paths each consumer chooses to interface with the seller. Simultaneously, customer needs have been evolving at a faster pace like the technology they use. As such, understanding customer needs, desires, and feelings across the entire customer journey is difficult.
The complexity arises from the growth of ecommerce and social media platforms that have made a paradigm shift in the touch points of the customers' journey. However, voice is still the primary ways of communication at one point or another during the customer's experience. Estimated 270 billion calls per year are made in the United States as part of this experience.
It is also estimated that 90% of US consumers prefer to resolve their unmet expectations or issues using telephone over alternative communication methods. The main source of data remains to be vast amount recorded voice ready to be used as actionable data. This fact makes the phone to remain a major channel for customer feedback in the effort of listening to the "voice of the customer".
Consequently, recorded voice should be looked at as unstructured data that remains to be analyzed for the purpose of understanding the customer intimately. The industry is poised to take a leap in transforming call recordings to insights and actionable data and then using this data effectively across the enterprise. This has become critical piece in the listening to the "voice of the customer" in the customer experience. Voice can serve as a foundation to providing simple and powerful way of uncovering the true needs of customers. The key to this effect is to deploy advanced voice and data analytics to capture the real "voice of the customer" integrated across all different channels and touch points. In the near future, voice is becoming a primary method to do search, buy a merchandise, and process customer care totally integrating holistic customer experience from the beginning to the end, submitting the order.
CHALLENGES
The challenges of traditional methods of collecting data from customers namely survey, focus groups, an internal questionnaire as a way of listening to the "voice of the customer" are expensive, inefficient, limited in numbers, and lack in depth analysis. In case of internal questionnaire, organizational silos and conflicting dispositions limit the intended results. In addition, companies with social media ratings are limited to small number of people with rants and raves. The traditional methods capture samples compared to the general population of customers that companies deal with on day to day basis.
Enterprises find it difficult to use data obtained from traditional methods effectively to influence business decisions in accordance with long term strategic goals. Moreover, the surveys (CSAT, Key Moment Surveys, Support Survey, Ad Hoc Survey) are focused on specific products/services, and results from these surveys are not distributed to other departments of the organization. For those companies that employs external agencies such as PR firms, the report can be cumbersome to filter through once the volume increases.
SOLUTION
Aggregated holistic voice and digital (email, chat, social media: Facebook, twitter, amazon, Instagram) analytics coupled with context sensitive sentiment analysis and emotional detection algorithm is the solution to precisely understand your customers' experience. Integrating data from voice recordings with other available sources of customer feedback helps companies understand the fine elements of the true "voice of the customer" with depth and accuracy of meaning.
The majority of unmined data is in the form recorded voice. Therefore, interpreting the spoken words correctly, and categorizing them accurately into topics of your customers' interest as well as identifying how your customers feel about the topics using voice analytics is imperative in listening to and understanding the "voice of the customer". Automatic speech recognition accuracy using natural language processing and neural networks to determine key words or phrases and up to 4th generation associated words to them are the most important part of voice analytics solution. The highest recognition percentage possible is key. The source of the engagement is equally important that the metadata that is used as an attribute to understand the topics each customer is discussing and make data driven decision. Sentiment analysis is also a tool you can use to learn how your customers feel about your products and services.
As part of the solution, the information needs to be presented on an interactive dashboard that is simple, summarized, customized with the flexibility to drill into details comprehensively showing the categorization, key words or phrases, sentiments and actual calls as well as data. The solution must be complete, scalable and cost effective.
BENEFITS
The primary benefit of using voice/data analytics is to increase omni channel qualitative and quantitative customer feedback. Companies can analyze high volume of data, identify hot topics, and uncover trends. It gives companies seamless and non-intrusive ways to learn about their customers. Companies truly gain the visibility into the topics that matter most to their customers listening to the "voice of the customer". In effect, companies reduce operational cost while maximizing customer experience.
The availability of data that is consistent, complete, cohesive and correct from the views of the customer allows organizations to develop, and implement strategies across their silos. The ability to share the readily available data across organization silos brings every member closer to the customer increasing the understanding of touch points of the customer experience. Organizations can transform their employees to become emphatic workforce with the ability to impact the customer experience even though they may not have customer facing roles. The ultimate benefit for the workforce to provide Personal Service as opposed to Customer Service.
Executives and other decision makers within organizations can make data driven decisions that have direct impact on the customers' experience. Organizations can learn about processes, products that are broken, methods of effective communication with customers, ideas about future products, industry trends, employee training, insights into their competitors and in turn provides customers with marketing campaigns, operational improvements, and call center satisfaction service that solidifies brand loyalty.
In addition, search engine optimization (SEO) for non-brand searches can also be achieved. Non-brand searches are expensive. It is important to know which non-brand searches are leading to conversions. The non-brand search words lead to create attribution model that can result to conversions. Therefore, the non-brand search words or phrases companies buy can be dynamically adjusted according to the results obtained from voice/data analytics.
IGNITE-TEK ADVANTAGE
Ignite-Tek is a ten-year old in ecommerce technology company that provides consumer acquisition engine for omni-channel marketing for businesses. Ignite prides itself to provide the best in class CONSISTENT, COMPLETE, CORRECT and COST-EFFECTIVE (4Cs) solutions to provide our clients detailed visibility of the customer experience at every level of their organization. Ignite enables its clients to deliver uniform world class omni-channel customer experience across all levels and department of organizations powered by advanced voice/data analytics directly tied to their customers.
Ignite's strength and competency are summarized in the following three areas of expertise:
TECHNOLOGY
Ignite's core technology, the best in class with best in market accuracy, is comprised of cutting-edge Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural language and Customized Machine Learning (CML) and Neural Network with deep learning capabilities to ingest omni-channel customer inquiries: calls, emails, text, chat, social media, Amazon ratings, to create meaningful and searchable data. The data is presented in a dashboard, LucidCX, that uses artificial intelligence with a series of analytical algorithms, pattern recognition, media attribution, and aggregated feedback for a 360-degree view. LucidCX gives users to view the data in the form of alert, summary, and detailed analysis with the ability to search for additional information as desired.
CUSTOMIZABLE SAAS BASED ARCHTIECTURE
Our solution is customizable meet each client's need. Ignite uses SAAS based architecture to make its solution scalable to meet the demand of its clients at any level. This cloud based SAAS solution prevents the traditional requirement rolling out new technology that is adding investments in their IT department. Once all other requirements are met, implementation is in full scale within 24 hours. Our clients normally get 24 hour turn-around time to receive the analysis from the time of receipt.
COST-EFFECTIVE
Ignite's pricing is highly competitive as a result of the implementation of SAAS based architecture. Our clients pay only for what they use based on the amount of data that is processed. Our solution is competitively priced without compromising technology or quality of service. This also has made us to be the best in class for voice/data analytics.
SUMMARY
Ignite is excited to partner with you to enhance your ability to listen to the "voice of the customer" for your customer feedback and other applications. Ignite has made its process of doing business with its clients simple and effective. Be part of an exciting future to learn about your customers using the best in class technology tool from Ignite. Let Ignite be the cohesive force that binds together your marketing, customer care, sales, service, and product design innovations powered by the best in class advanced analytics to deliver consistent and uncompromising products/services based on actual meaningful data directly from your customers.
