Tapping Into the Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Written by KOVA Corp

Tim Whiting of Opinionlab recently wrote a great article about tapping into the Voice of the Customer (VoC) when delivering an optimal website redesign.

While the article is specific to website redesign, it applies to any area of your business where you’ll have customer contact. Customer relationships are the key to any successful business, but they’re the lifeblood of a call center. Because of this, it makes sense to listen to the VoC as much as possible.

With a dozen or so major website redesigns under his belt, Tim knows that the VoC comes from many sources. As he writes, customer feedback can be direct, indirect, or inferred. Direct feedback is the most obvious and it can be obtained from a number of sources. The most effective direct feedback is that which is initiated by your customers.

When visitors to your site comment on site errors, you’re able to fix them much faster than you can if people aren’t commenting. It will likely also take you longer to discover the error if your customers aren’t providing feedback on the error. When you hear what issues customers are experiencing, you have the opportunity to replicate them, diagnose them, and fix them.

Indirect feedback about your website comes from non-website sources such as social media. When customers aren’t completely satisfied with something they will talk about it, especially on social media. Inferred feedback comes from observing the behavior of visitors on your site.

Below are three ways you can tap into the VoC at your contact center.

Surveys

If you’re not sure how your customers feel about a particular aspect of your website or processes, just ask them.

You can use Customer Experience Survey Software to create surveys that begin after an interaction with a call center agent, asking your customers how the agent performed. You can also email surveys to customers after their session has ended. Surveys are an important part of your call center customer feedback process.

Social Media

Make sure you have a process for monitoring social media for comments about your service.

Listen to the VoC by engaging with customers on social media. Pay attention to what people are posting about other companies in your industry as well, especially if you see any negative images or posts.

If you see anything negative about your business, make sure you rectify the situation right away and reach out and talk to the customer, apologizing for their bad experience.

Call Recordings

Take advantage of call center recordings and use them to find ways to improve the customer experience.

Verint Media Recorder software monitors calls so supervisors can assess agent performance and identify strengths and weaknesses. Once the supervisor has done so, he or she can schedule one-on-one coaching time with the agent to work on improving their skills.

You can even take it one step further and allow your agents to log in and view results of feedback provided by the customers they spoke to.

Want to learn more about learning from the Voice of the Customer? Read our post “Best Practices When Hiring for a VoC Team.”

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