Nancy Porte, Vovici, guest-writes for Loyalty 360's State of the Industry series:
Customer-driven brand perception that can spread negative and positive feedback in the blink of an eye leads us to the current state of the industry, the convergence of multi-channel feedback capabilities that require strategic platforms capable of tracking and measuring a customer's journey across touch points. Convergence is about simplifying a process and bringing together things that are not alike. Forward-thinking organizations are looking to vendors to develop a centralized means of data collection and analysis capabilities through structured and unstructured interactions.
Whether through surveys, email, voice, chat or social media, customer touch points offer opportunities for companies to keep customers engaged through personalized, consistently great experiences.
Voice of the customer (VoC) means different things to different organizations, but for most is a strategic imperative that can drive significant competitive advantage. This emerging trend rewards companies for listening and acting on customer interactions across various touch points and is being adopted by leading organizations around the world. However, those responsible for VoC initiatives need better ways to gather data and disseminate insights that enable the organization to better manage customer experiences. The evolution of the "Voice of the Customer hub" is starting to take shape to help organizations encapsulate and maximize the data from an increasing number of touch points. This extended vision will track and accurately measure all interactions involving the call center, surveys, social media, communities and more, ultimately pinpointing the user identity throughout the lifecycle and measure these interactions for satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
VoC is expressed across a variety of interactions and encompasses a vast amount of structured and unstructured information. Often captured in silos by individual departments or single channels, the concept of a VoC hub will offer organizations a solution to unify stovepipe approaches to collecting and analyzing previously isolated customer feedback. Coupled with robust analytical capabilities the solutions will evolve to enable organizations to track a customer's journey across channels, perform trend analysis, sentiment analysis, root cause analysis and more. Organizations will start to see a clear picture of the customers by maintaining a centralized repository of channel identities, customer demographics, organizational characteristics as well as respondent history. Automated actions will resemble workflow controlled case management, providing an audit worthy approach to acting on customer insight.
Customer experience ecosystems can be intentionally designed. Through the right VoC solutions, traditionally siloed technologies associated with the capture, storage and analysis of direct, indirect and inferred customer feedback can come together. Technologies such as social media monitoring, enterprise feedback management (EFM), speech analytics, text mining and Web analytics are integrated to provide a holistic view of the customer voice. The resultant customer insights are acted on by disseminating relevant information to the right person at the right time on the right channel.
We all know that customers today have immense power to influence the perception of an organizations brand and that customer satisfaction and loyalty can all be correlated to underlying business metrics. The goal for organizations today engaged in a VoC program is to move customers from being satisfied to being loyal and advocating their business. To create experiences that delight customers and build deep, lasting loyalty, companies need a systematic approach for creating an intelligent, ongoing dialogue with them and the technology to capture, analyze and effectively utilize the data which has given rise to the VoC hub concept.
This vision does not come without a challenge to the industry. There are a number of hurdles around architecture, data collection and storage, customer identity resolution, analytics, integration and more. But this challenge opens up a world of opportunity for vendors like Vovici to simplify, integrate and align the understanding of customer interactions.