How to Improve Contact Center Performance with Voice of Customer (VOC) – Part 1
Modern brands prioritize customer satisfaction to create positive and memorable customer experiences (CX). Therefore, they seek ways to measure customer satisfaction, one method being listening to customer feedback across various contact channels, or conducting Voice of Customer (VoC) surveys.
Today, we’ll learn about improving Contact Center efficiency through Voice of Contact (VoC). What are some examples? Let’s find out!
What is Voice of Customer (VoC)?
It is a technique or method for listening to customer feedback in order to understand their problems or expectations and use that information to further improve services.
Where are VoCs (VoCs) obtained from?
This information was gathered from customer feedback through various channels, such as call surveys, email surveys, follow-up calls, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, social media, and direct conversations between customers and employees.
You can read more in the topic VOC: Essential Techniques for CX Professionals.
Why is VoC important?
Because the data obtained from listening to customer voices (VoC) can be analyzed by brands to provide insightful information, allowing them to understand what customers want and how well they are responding to those needs in their service. This enables brands to find solutions and improve their services to better meet customer requirements.
For more details on techniques for listening to the voice of the customer, please see the topic “ 12 Techniques to Win Over Customers (VOC Methodologies)”.
What are some of the problems and obstacles in implementing Voice Calls (VoCs) in a Contact Center?
Contact centers are crucial as a source for listening to customer voices (VoC). Many brands want to drive VOC engagement within their contact centers, but sometimes this process fails due to several problems and obstacles, including:
1. Managers in the Contact Center are afraid to ask customers for accurate information.
Some managers view receiving complaints as an added burden and increased administrative costs. However, wise managers believe that knowing about impending disaster beforehand is always better than not knowing at all; at least it allows them to avoid the worst possible consequences.
2. It is not possible to systematically record data collected from various customer service channels.
Data entry officers found the volume of data received from various channels to be time-consuming, believed it was useless, or thought management would use the data to discipline employees, so they were reluctant to enter the data into the system.
3. The management system is difficult to use, inefficient, or inconsistent.
From data recording and analysis to reporting, trend tracking, and problem-solving, there is no data integration from the Contact Center.
4. Unable to analyze textual or descriptive data.
Most information obtained from reviews or complaints is text-based or unstructured. Therefore, it requires analysis to transform this text into numerical data and statistics, and to present it in terms of added value, costs, and returns, providing management with options to make informed decisions.
Despite these obstacles, brands remain undeterred and continue to strive to find ways to implement Voice of Customer (VoC) in their contact centers. The emergence of omnichannel means contact centers are no longer limited to providing product information, tracking orders, or handling complaints. Powered by omnichannel, contact centers now collect vast amounts of customer data from multiple sources, including phone calls, emails, text messages, and social media.
The first method to improve Contact Center performance using Voice of Operators (VOCs).
Based on our research, we found that various brands use Voice of Contact (VoC) in their Contact Centers in three ways. This article will focus on the first method.
Method 1. Use Voice of Account (VOC) to improve first call resolution (FCR) for customers.
Leading contact centers that provide world-class customer service use Voice of Customer (VoC) methods to measure call center performance, improve first-call resolution (FCR), and enhance customer service. Customers feel great knowing someone is willing to listen; they will share everything they need to know. Most importantly, contact centers must leverage customer feedback and comments gathered from VoC to continuously improve their service, because delivering superior customer service requires utilizing VoC data to its fullest potential.
1.1 Using a combination of structured and unstructured VoC data.
Most contact centers tend to analyze structured voice (VoC) data to understand customer expectations from phone calls or emails, such as customer satisfaction surveys (Csat) and net promoter ratings. However, in reality, this data must also be combined with unstructured or text-based information, such as social media comments and reviews, which makes data analysis more complex.
1.2 Integrating VoC data with call center performance scores.
In addition to incorporating customer feedback and posts into customer satisfaction scores, performance data from call center agents should also be considered. For example, the average call answering speed should be within 120 seconds, and agents should answer on the first call. If call center agents perform this way, every time the First Call Resolution (FCR) increases by 1%, customer satisfaction will also increase by 1%.
Next time, we’ll write about the remaining two ways to improve Contact Center efficiency by listening to Customer Voice (VOC).
