For decades, we’ve been collecting customer feedback through various forms of surveys such as email and text, live and automated phone surveys, even the suggestion box. However, today those channels are not enough to provide the rich data needed to make an accurate, positive change that will improve customer experience.

Now, customers are more sophisticated, many are pressed for time and they often don’t respond to traditional survey requests like they used to. This has led to a major shift in the way brands collect and analyze customer feedback as they attempt to create a more engaging experience. “Voice of the customer” (VoC) is the term used to describe the process of gathering information about customers’ experiences, preferences and expectations.

Today’s mature view of VoC has evolved to encompass the metadata that drives a complete understanding of the customer’s experience without having to ask for information. Now, it’s all about marrying data from multiple sources: customer relationship management (CRM) systems, data associated with a transaction, customer account information (including the type of device they are using). All of this data provides the minute details that make up what customers see, think and experience along the buyer’s journey, which helps paint the bigger picture of what they have experienced, how their experience differs from others and if it met their expectations.

What Is Experience Management?

VoC has outgrown traditional forms of feedback and evolved into what is more widely known as experience management (XM). At Verint, we focus on intelligent-driven customer engagement solutions for our clients, and my colleague and our resident VoC expert, Rick Blair, provides this insightful differentiation: VoC refers to the act of listening across experiences, while XM analyzes the listening posts and develops the process improvements designed to change or enhance customer experiences. A listening post is a point in the process (or journey) where companies can collect and analyze feedback from their customers.

From my perspective, the companies that are listening not only in the contact center but also across the entire organization are in a strong position. They have the ability to share customer data, insights and actions across the organization, and still address and respect the boundaries that exist within the enterprise.

For example, one of our customers ran a promo code campaign that expired at midnight. The issue? It was set to expire at midnight Eastern Time. Frustrated customers outside of the time zone began calling the contact center saying the promo code was not working. Coverage in the contact center enabled getting the workarounds to agents and informing the e-commerce team about the issue so they could address it and understand the impacts on related marketing programs.

Today’s Challenge: Tying Relevant Data To XM

With all this powerful technology in place, we are still faced with one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century: What do we do with all of this data and how do we get the best insights from it? Companies are quickly catching on to the fact that there is a wealth of insight in just about every piece of data across the customer journey. Having access to that data at any given time comes with the need for teams skilled in big data and data science. 

In addition to skilled data science and big data teams, natural language processing (NLP) has made it easier to understand huge volumes of unstructured data and identify key themes and customer sentiment. Advances in both big data and cloud computing have made it easier to handle larger volumes of data, as well as connect it together to understand the associated patterns. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) make it possible for VoC programs to move beyond listening and drive actual closed-loop exchanges that address customer needs without human intervention. These trends are also shifting the skill sets required of VoC teams.

These are the CX challenges that organizations faced before Covid-19 shut down business as usual. With physical locations quickly shuttered, online and by phone became the only means of engaging with customers. For some organizations, it meant a painful realization that they didn’t have the necessary VoC tools in place, or lacked the right contextual data needed to understand where experiences were falling short. It also showcased the importance of automation and self-service with the increased shift to other channels (chat, social media, etc.). 

The shift to these channels also placed huge demands on the teams dedicated to managing VoC programs. Overnight, teams were forced to interpret the huge increase in data, in many cases without the tools needed to manage such high volumes. We’re seeing that these behavioral changes are permanently altering channel preference and forcing changes in companies’ VoC programs.

Always Put The Customer First

Putting customers first, listening to what they want and delivering on those expectations should continue to be at the core of VoC and XM efforts. Today’s programs should expand the definition of listening to create more engaging experiences and deliver the right data to teams that can act on it to create highly satisfied, loyal repeat customers.