Winning a new customer is challenging, but it’s not the end game. A lot of work is still ahead, as organizations strive to develop long and deep relationships with customers. While a customer’s purchase or choice may mark the beginning of a new relationship, it’s only their initial step towards recognizing value from the decision they made.Beyond the first purchase or initiating the relationship, each negative or positive customer experience has a direct ripple effect impacting loyalty and customer lifetime value. It’s one of the main reasons organizations invest in voice of the customer (VOC), carefully measure and track CSAT and NPS, and use powerful predictive technology to spot signs of dissatisfaction and potential churn.In particular, leveraging your customers’ direct feedback and contact center experiences—given the focus on questions, complaints, and reporting of issues and problems—is key for gauging the health of your customer relationships and identifying opportunities to improve CX across your organization.Instead of considering your call center a cost center, it’s time to start thinking about it as a valuable source of insight to inform customer experience strategic planning, help you identify opportunities for continuous improvement, and drive revenue by promoting enterprise-wide action. In fact, research from Accenture found that when customer service is perceived as a value center, revenue growth is 3.5X higher.[1]Let’s explore how you can transform your contact center into a value center.
The contact center is the heart of CX
Like your heart pumps blood throughout your body, your contact center can pump vital CX insights throughout your organization. Because of its centralized location and the agents’ daily interactions with customers, it’s the best source for capturing the voice of the customer.
It provides a continuous feed of customers’ needs, desires, and issues
The contact center should be the first stop If your organization wants to address questions such as:
What are our customers talking about? What trends are they responding to?
What questions do customers have? What are they confused about?
What’s the impact of the problems/issues that customers are experiencing?
What sentiment is reflected across the customer journey, and why?
It's where customers share valuable, journey-based details about their experiences
Customers usually reach out because they have questions or are struggling with products/services—or because they have had confusing or negative experiences with another channel. By capturing and sharing the reason for the contact(s), you can help your organization understand CX stress points and where to focus improvement efforts to have the biggest impact.
Business outcomes from operationalizing VOC insights from the contact center
A holistic VOC solution can capture, combine, and analyze call center data, operational data, and direct and indirect feedback and provide journey-based insights that help you better understand and manage omnichannel customer experiences.Such data can include:
How a call was initiated
What the customer experienced from other systems (i.e., queues selected, wait times, transfers, etc.)
What transpired during their agent interaction (indirect feedback from call recordings and interaction analytics)
Quality management scores
Direct feedback from post-interaction surveys (via IVR, email, chat, SMS, web, social, etc.)
As the heart of the organization, contact center VOC insights are broad and deep and can be operationalized across the rest of your organization, across other channels, products, and services and across influential teams to have a significant influence and impact on:Your contact center is an invaluable resource for uncovering negative customer experience, problems, issues, and opportunities. If you’re not paying attention, those CX “blind spots” can quickly develop into rising customer attrition, diminishing loyalty, and an overall weakening of your brand’s market position.By holistically analyzing data on call type, interaction analytics, and direct feedback collected in post-interaction surveys, you can better understand sources of customer friction and isolate the root causes, proactively identify issues, understand their severity and impact on CX—and get them addressed.Customers find it easy to talk with agents about what they experienced and why they believe their issue demands attention. By sharing this info with the teams who can close the loop with appropriate action, the contact center delivers business impact. That impact can mean higher customer retention rates and an increase in cross-sell and upsell opportunities.The contact center plays an important role in digital transformation. Using VOC in your contact center will provide deeper insight into the digital customer experience so you can amplify what's working, and know which areas or issues need attention.Customers who fail at self-service through a digital channel often pick up the phone to get support, so voice becomes the primary support for digital channels when features and functionality are either ineffective or unavailable for some reason.Your contact center can help to support the development, innovation, and advancement of digital-first strategies by continually pumping information to the teams with direct responsibility for digital channels, such as:Volume of calls related to digital experiences—Wondering whether your digital channels are effective? This measure can be an indicator of how well your organization is delivering on its digital-first (and digital-only) strategies.Summary of reported problems or issues—Call recordings and feedback related to call reason, descriptions of issues experienced, and customer expectations are all critical inputs for digital developers, since user experience is often a key differentiator. These inputs help developers identify meaningful areas of UX improvement and opportunities for future innovation.Summary of questions—Many customers call after failing to find info themselves on your company website or in response to receiving a confusing email. Related teams can learn a lot from understanding what questions customers ask when they call. Web developers and digital marketing teams may work to refine website structure or content in response to this valuable feedback data.Early warning on emerging issues—Your contact center can provide early warning about an outage or dysfunction. For example, the IT team may not realize that customers are having issues with specific e-commerce functionality since the website is active and working. So if the volume of calls about a specific issue spikes over a short period of time, the contact center can help secure necessary attention.Calls that should be digital-enabled—Contact center managers can probably list a number of reasons for calls that they wish customers were empowered to accomplish on their own through a digital channel. Providing specific call data can be the catalyst for that change to self-service.When VOC insights generated through the contact center are shared enterprise wide (through shared dashboards or regular reports), it creates the opportunity to harmonize processes and structures and to create/adjust product and service offerings in ways that truly demonstrate your organization’s commitment to customer-centricity.When you go beyond just listening and take action based on the voice of the customer, it can have a positive impact on a number of business KPIs and increase:
Toyota Financial Services, one of the largest auto finance providers in the world, was able to improve CX and agent experience, resolve customer issues faster, elevate effective retention efforts, and reduce customer churn by centralizing their CX data and sharing it with representatives in real time.
A better post-sale customer journey
Winning a new customer is only the start of a new journey, with steps including getting started, learning more, getting answers, and being taken care of. That extended relationship can be quickly derailed if something’s not quite right or if the customer doesn’t feel that they’re getting value. The resulting customer churn increases your organization’s acquisition costs and can limit business growth.As the CX heart of your organization, your contact center is perfectly positioned to capture VOC and share valuable, actionable CX insights that can provide early warning about at-risk customers, shape product/service priorities to reflect customer preferences, uncover opportunities for cross-sell, and deliver real business value enterprise wide. Learn best practices for driving meaningful action and business results with omnichannel VOC. Read the eBook: From Contact Center to Impact Center.[1] Accenture: End-to-Endless Customer Service (2022)
