The Real Value of VoC Programs

As a Contact Center manager, you likely already have an established method of trying to understand how you are being perceived by your customers. 

Whether you have had a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program for quite some time, or you are just starting out, chances are that you are capturing customer feedback across all of your contact center channels, summarizing it and then presenting the data on a dashboard, which is reported to your leadership on a regular basis.

Your Customer Experience (CX) or Support teams' may even analyze the data and create a list of recommended ideas to consider, which may or may not be implemented because too often you’re already focused on the next initiative or project. What happens then? A month later and your team simply repeats this cycle because that's how the VoC process has always worked.

It’s great that the VoC scores are getting CX or Support management visibility and you're demonstrating the importance of capturing and analyzing customer insights and feedback, but if your VoC data just lives as a ‘completed’ report for your CX and Support teams, is your job really done?

CX Management

Everyone intuitively understands that customer feedback should be a top concern for the entire organization. From a practical standpoint, though, involving the entire business in CX and VoC can prove challenging, especially in very large, multinational organizations.

At Cyara, we often hold brainstorming or ‘think tank’ sessions where we gather key internal stakeholders, present them with feedback from customers, and then work together to understand issues brought to light and generate solutions to address them. In these situations, it’s always better to have a cross-functional team resulting in a greater breadth and depth of ideas that span the organization. These sessions have consistently resulted in the development of comprehensive, and innovative solution proposals. However, while these brainstorming sessions hold value, realistically they can occur only a few times a year as they require a significant amount of time, planning and commitment for many of our employees. 

Cyara CentraCX, a cloud-based VoC management solution, automates the process of sessions like these, but without the heavy time constraints. The core advantage of CentraCX is that it enables your team to collaborate, contribute context to, and learn from the customer feedback that has been captured across all of your customer communication channels. And once the data is gathered, reports are automatically shared with the right cross-functional teams who can manage this feedback and take the relevant actions. This transforms customer feedback management into an automated, efficient and easier process that will be an integral part of your organization's everyday operations.

Once regular engagement with customer feedback becomes embedded into your organization, you’ll discover another benefit: a culture of continuous improvement becomes a common thread across all of your key stakeholders and teams, and all because you have been able to streamline the process and weave it into your regular operational rhythm. The more your employees, agents and managers understand the importance of responding to customer feedback, the more energy they will put toward crafting solutions and adapting to changes more easily and quickly.

Democratizing how your VoC data is absorbed and shared throughout the organization enables a common view to customer feedback, and allows every team to think about how that feedback can help their respective teams improve. This can benefit all parts of your organization from Marketing and Sales, to HR and Product. Implementing changes based on relevant customer feedback can also be incredibly empowering for your team, especially when they see the resultant positive impact on customers' experiences.

If your customer feedback remains confined to the CX department and you use it solely for business reporting or to drive product or process improvements, you're only harnessing a fraction of its true value, leaving a large portion of your team outside of the customer feedback loop.

Agent Engagement

A key goal of any business is to secure and retain customers with long-lasting, mutually beneficial and valued relationships. Therefore, it's essential that everyone within your organization is actively contributing to achieving successful customer outcomes. Whether a contact center agent on the frontline, a CX development designer, a business or operations manager, or any other role, all individuals within your organization should have access to customer feedback to understand how their areas of responsibility can influence the CX. They should be genuinely interested in understanding the thoughts and feelings of your customers, and always seek out ways of improving.

Critically, when your contact center agents receive strong positive feedback from a customer, it's important to publicly acknowledge it. Let them bask in the recognition that they've done an exceptional job and are appreciated, not only by you and your team, but also by customers.

However, when negative feedback includes the names of agents, it's advisable to remove these before sharing it at an organization-wide level. It’s important though that these customer insights are discussed privately with the respective agent so that they can learn from them and identify any areas for improvement. 

Giving agents the opportunity to add context to feedback tied to specific incidents, like what CentraCX’s Tribal Analytics enables, will also encourage deeper engagement and empower your agents to understand, improve, and feel ownership in how their service is impacting your customers and the business at large.

So, let the customer's voice resonate throughout your organization by leveraging CentraCX. Allow your contact center agents to engage with the feedback and empower them to utilize it to make decisions that will improve organizational outcomes and, ultimately, the customer experience.