How VOC Analytics Improves Contact Center Performance

Contact centers are big on analytics. The main reason companies measure things like their call-handle time, first-call resolution, and internal quality management (QM) scores are to improve customer satisfaction. Although these metrics are valuable, they are internal to the organization, and they may or may not affect satisfaction.

So, how do you know if customers are pleased with their level of service? What are their feelings regarding the company? How loyal are they? By increasing performance levels, the hope is that this will lead to better customer satisfaction. However, what if there are additional improvements that can be made that you haven’t even considered?

To find out the answers to these questions and more, it’s important to ask customers and listen to what their responses are. Fortunately, tools do exist that collect direct customer feedback, or Voice of Customer (VoC), which can give insight as to the level of service they received so operations can be enhanced.

How VOC Tools Work

Many VOC tools work with the phone system’s interactive voice response (IVR) creator to deliver a telephony-based survey after a call. Additionally, some tools use a call-back approach to provide a machine-based survey.

When using these methods, customer responses are collected with a dial pad or voice XML input. However, a drawback to call-back surveys is that they are primarily dependent on phone systems. Therefore, they can become costly due to carrier charges for SMS/MMS service.

Alternatively, a more cost-effective VOC approach is to deliver web-based surveys through email, chat sessions, or text messages. And by using software tools, companies can send these surveys out to specific customers based on call type, call queue, call length, customer campaign, and other considerations.

Creating a Web-Based VOC Survey

Typically, a form designer creates web-based VOC surveys. Questions are listed, and they may add graphics that are consistent with the company’s brand. Through different survey questions, organizations can calculate some of the more common VOC metrics, including:

• Customer Effort Score (CES) – Measures the level of effort your customers devote to doing business with you (the less effort, the better).

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Determines customer loyalty by asking if they would refer your company to others.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – Measures how satisfied customers are with the service provided by agents to help find improvement areas.

Companies often use a number scale (one through five) to rank customer responses. This form of answering is a simple and convenient way to collect data and look for trends. On the other hand, open-ended questions are more time consuming, but they can also produce valuable insights. Companies should use these types of questions sparingly, or it could affect the survey’s response rate.

What to Do with VOC Data

Once you have your VOC survey data, it can certainly be analyzed and trended, but there are additional and valuable applications as well. For example, when VOC survey data is added to the call center KPI dashboard, it can be analyzed alongside internal KPIs and QM scores.

Contact center platforms can import and display the data in an executive dashboard to provide a holistic view of top-level, touch-point KPIs in a single, clean interface. If companies experience integration issues or are not using contact center software, data can be manually consolidated in a spreadsheet.

Either way, correlations can be searched for between trend lines, and you can determine which internal KPIs and QM targets have a positive effect on VOC. This way, efforts can be concentrated on those specific metrics.

VOC analytics complement the call center’s internal KPIs and can provide a better view of a company’s overall performance. Plus, data can be trended over time so that correlations can be made to determine which of internal KPIs are truly driving higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Corey Leonard is a Business Development Director for Coordinated Systems. Corey has dedicated his career to building strong, long lasting relationships within partner channels bringing people and technologies together to improve the customer experience within the contact center industry. Corey is very passionate about Workforce Optimization (WFO) / Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and how people, process and technology are used in today's leading cloud contact center environments.

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