Breathing Life Into Boring Voice of the Customer Initiatives

Just because your call center surveys customers and occasionally even looks at the feedback they provide doesn’t mean you have a "Voice of the Customer" initiative in place. A true VOC program entails continuously and carefully analyzing customer ratings and sentiment, identifying trouble spots and trends, and taking decisive action before your customer base starts to hate you as much as your agents do.

If your call center is as serious about the customer experience as it is about low wages and bad lighting, then you need to make sure that your VOC initiative includes the following special components:

Tools that report whether the customer was using their "inside voice" or their "outside voice."Naturally, you want to pay attention to any customer who provides negative comments about a recent interaction, but for prioritization purposes it’s important to distinguish between customers who are merely a little frustrated and those who are considering hiring a hit man. By investing in speech analytics tools that detect customers’ emotion/volume levels during calls and survey responses, it becomes easier to determine which customers to ignore, which ones to call back within the week, and which ones to kidnap immediately before they ruin your brand via Twitter.

"Fist of the Customer" (FOC) software.Sometimes customers don’t verbalize exactly what they are feeling, thus it’s important to have tools in place that can dig deeper and uncover hidden sentiment. While still very much in the testing phase, FOC technology measures how forcefully frustrated customers throw their phones or punch their computers when interacting with an agent or IVR. Equipped with special motion-detection software that I’m too stupid to understand or explain, a typical FOC solution can be programmed to send an instant alert to the call center’s recovery team whenever a customer’s punch reaches a "Mike Tyson" or "Jerry Springer guest" level of force.

A "Last Word" option for agents. To avoid having your customers’ negative and abusive comments adversely affect agent retention and morale, it’s important to incorporate a VOA (Voice of the Agent) component into your VOC program. After receiving a scathing rating or comment from a customer, agents will likely want to retaliate and get the last word in after they stop crying. Let them do so by providing them with what they think is the customer’s phone number but is really the number to a crisis hotline where operators are used to enduring profanity-laden diatribes from complete strangers.

Is your call center acting on the voice of the customer? It should be--learn strategies that work from those who've succeeded at the International Contact Center Summit!