Voice Of The Customer: The New Digital Frontier
The Internet has permanently changed the dynamics of customer interaction. The digital landscape we are all immersed in on a daily basis has become more complex and multifaceted. Today’s enterprises must be able to deliver answers and information to customers quickly and effectively across multiple self-service and assisted channels 24x7.
Are consumers more empowered than ever before? Does this new reality present a challenge for the enterprise? The answer on both counts is yes.
As with any challenge, there is a massive opportunity hidden just beneath the surface. In this case, that opportunity lies with the untapped ability to understand the “hearts and minds” of consumers, their concerns, their interests, their patterns of behavior, and how all of these can change and be influenced by corporate decisions.
Understanding the Root of the Problem
The “old way” of assembling voice of the customer (VoC) insight is still the status quo at most organizations, and this presents all manner of problems for marketers and customer experience professionals.
At most organizations, customer insight is still typically siloed by traditional means of research such as:
- Focus groups
- Surveys
- Interviews
- Call center interactions
And they’re grossly ineffective and rarely in real-time, resulting in “insights” that are dated and often “inferred” rather than coming directly in the authentic voice of the customer. Not surprisingly, two-thirds of companies report VoC programs don’t deliver financial results. Why? Because these old school approaches to voice of the customer are rife with problems.
Here are the five problems with doing VoC the “old way:”
Capturing data is event-driven, fractured and fragmented. Data collected through traditional methods is rarely integrated into operational systems and processes. Focus groups and interviews, for example, present obvious challenges with getting verbal insights into a database.
Analyzing data is difficult and manual. Once the data is collected, marketers next encounter problems with ‘big data.’
You have the data… now what? Even when companies go to the trouble of capturing and analyzing data, many struggle with what to do with the analysis.
Time delay. Without detailed, useful analysis, no action can be taken. But it often falls on a business analyst to conduct manual analysis, meaning analysis becomes another task on someone’s already full “to do” list.
Cost. Focus groups and surveys are expensive. Each of these activities represents budget that could be put to better use. Fortunately, we have reached a point in time where these problems have begun to dissipate. Enabling technologies that simplify and automate data collection and analysis have brought about change.
VoC the Old Way: Putting Lipstick on a Pig?
A close look at the “quality” of data gathered with traditional approaches to VoC reveals the quality of information collected is highly suspect, due to the inherent resistance of customers to participate in research events.
It all amounts to putting lipstick on the proverbial pig; trying to force customers to spend time doing something they just don’t want to do, and then making decisions based on the answers they give while in this resistant state of mind!
Today, the real opportunity that our omni-channel, Web-centric world provides is the ability to get real-time access to that authentic voice of all customers. By authentic voice, we mean natural language questions posed to your brand’s key online destinations—where your customers choose to initiate the interaction.
Online self-service technology—and in particular, virtual agents/virtual assistants—can be at the forefront of this new capability. Think about how effective Apple’s Siri product has been and the data that a tool like Siri can generate. It’s an absolute goldmine because it is by nature permission-based data that is driven by the end user.
Virtual agents (VAs) are software services that engage in automated conversations with customers in self-service environments. VAs empower customers through their journey for answers and task completion by simplifying the process of delivering information across multiple interaction channels.
Virtual agents effectively serve as 24x7 research agents that sit on digital channels to collect customer-entered questions, and push information back to the enterprise in real-time.
Collecting a question, as typed in by a customer in his or her own language, and then having real-time access to the themes and trends automatically extracted from those questions is a marketer’s dream.
In this way, today’s leading virtual agent technologies deliver bene?ts that resolve the problems faced by marketers who struggle with the old approach to VoC. Most importantly virtual agents can be located in every channel including web, mobile, social and agent desktops.
How Are Companies Benefitting from Virtual Agent-Powered VoC?
When virtual agents are used to identify themes and trends from customer questions, the organization benefits in the form of actionable insight. The bene?ts of these insights take many forms, and include:
- Opportunities for new products, services or feature improvements;
- Early warnings on potential customer issues that can be identifed and resolved quickly;
- Competitive insights in the form of customer questions that reference competitive offers; and
- Correlations between recent promotional efforts and the receptiveness of those messages.
IntelliResponse provides virtual agent technology solutions for the enterprise. We create profitable online conversations for our private and public sector customers around the world, via engaging virtual agent technology that delivers highly accurate answers, captures key voice of the customer insights, and delivers relevant offers that improve conversion.
IntelliResponse is here to help you in your immediate next steps. Having deployed world-class virtual agent technology solutions at more than 150 enterprise organizations worldwide, IntelliResponse has a wealth of expertise to support you as you revolutionize voice of the customer at your organization.
To read the full report, including “7 Critical Questions for Getting Started,” download it at info.intelliresponse.com/KMWorld0714.html