Customer Feedback Unplugged: Harnessing VOC insights to boost agent performance and elevate CX

Happy agents. Happy customers.

Agent engagement and satisfaction have become proxy measures for CX success, because in study after study, it’s been proven that happier agents lead to happier customers.

I recently conducted a two-part video interview (part 1 and part 2) with Robin Gareiss, CEO and principal analyst at Metrigy, to discuss her firm’s research on agent engagement, as well as how top-performing companies leverage customer feedback to motivate agents to perform at their best—and recognize the ones who do.

Let’s start by looking at several strategic ways contact center leaders can use customer feedback to improve agent performance and service quality.

Empower agents to meet evolving customer demands

Making an impact on agent engagement requires data. You need to know how customers perceive the level of service they’re receiving, and how they feel about the people delivering those service experiences.

Gareiss notes that without customer feedback, contact center supervisors are basically shooting blind, so it’s important to integrate customer feedback KPIs, such as CSAT, into quality management and performance management systems.

While supervisors could simply base their coaching on agent experience, knowledge and what they’ve observed over a given week, they won’t know if that experience or knowledge will resonate with ever-changing customer demands.

So, it’s important that contact center leaders keep the endgame in mind and not get distracted simply by agent knowledge metrics. By integrating voice of the customer (VOC) feedback, contact centers can stay attuned to evolving customer needs, ensuring that agent training and coaching are always aligned with the latest customer expectations.

As Gareiss notes, “When you think about it, the ultimate goal of CX is basically to provide a positive interaction and a resolution for the customer.”

Identify coachable agents, hidden top performers

Customer feedback can also help supervisors identify agents who are coachable and identify those who—despite feedback that suggests they need to make some changes—are stuck in their ways.

Metrigy research finds that 48% of companies use automated workflows to add customer feedback to online agent training. “Customer feedback can basically help supervisors say, ‘Okay, you're not doing your job, you're not listening to feedback, you're not responding to your coaching, you're now put on notice,’” says Gareiss.

But on the positive side, customer feedback can also help supervisors highlight agents who are incredible at what they do—those who might otherwise have been flying under the radar to supervisors or peers.

Overall, customer feedback helps to highlight who's doing really well and who's not, so you can work to improve both the agent experience and customer experience.

Use gamification to recognize, reward top performers

Top-performing agents typically like to be recognized and rewarded for their achievements.

Supervisors can use performance management, gamification and quality management dashboards to foster healthy competition, while incorporating VOC insights to drive improvements.

Customer sentiment and quality scores help agents see where they are, so using those customer insights, you can provide objective quantitative or qualitative views that motivate agents to improve.

Direct customer feedback removes any argument that supervisors might be playing favorites, or that what one supervisor likes to see or hear may be different from another supervisor.

Gareiss notes that healthy competition raises the bar, and that tying customer feedback to incentives, such as gift cards, cash rewards or even the ability to select your schedule for the next week or month, can be very effective motivators.

How better agent performance drives CX gains

When agents know that positive customer feedback is the key to their rewards, they treat customers with more empathy, more efficiency, and more enthusiasm. And if agents are in competition to earn those five-star ratings, their performance and engagement levels increase.

Metrigy’s Customer Insights and Analytics 2023-2024 study found that top-performing companies who implemented robust, successful VOC programs achieved 18.2% higher revenue, 17.2% higher CSAT ratings, 23.8% higher agent productivity, and 6.6% lower operational costs, as compared to peer companies.

Three things top-performing companies do differently

So, what do those top-performing companies do differently when it comes to using VOC insights to drive agent engagement, performance, and CX gains?

Here’s what Metrigy’s research says:

1. They correlate customer feedback with employee performance.
   Among top-performing companies, 82.8% correlate VOC insights and metrics with employee performance and use them to power agent recognition and reward programs. This helps both contact center supervisors and agents improve quality management accuracy.
   
   
2. They integrate customer feedback throughout the company.
   Top-performing companies recognize the value of customer feedback beyond the contact center and share it across the enterprise to inform marketing and sales initiatives, product development and other strategic decisions with an eye on improving the overall customer experience.
   
   
3. They use customer feedback in multiple ways.
   CX leaders at the most successful companies say that the top benefit customer feedback delivers is that it helps them to identify emerging problems that the company can address.

But beyond that, they also see tremendous value for driving employee recognition and coaching and identifying key customer-facing technologies—55.2% correlate CSAT with technology to evaluate which digital offerings are resonating with customers, so they can make smarter investments in digital transformation.

Act on VOC insights to deliver better CX

Research has shown that companies that invest in VOC programs and use customer feedback strategically to guide decisions in the contact center and beyond, outperform their peers with higher agent engagement, better CSAT, higher revenue, and lower operational costs.

By following the strategies outlined above—with specific focus on what top-performing companies do differently than their peers—contact center leaders can cultivate a motivated, customer-centric workforce that delivers outstanding service experiences, and help to drive impactful changes to improve CX.