Mastering the Voice of the Customer with Cross-Channel Interaction Analytics

Guest Post By: Shlomi Ziv and Vasudeva Akula.

Customer Dynamics—the ongoing, multifaceted interactions and transactions between customers and organizations—contains a wealth of information about how companies can improve. Tune in to it and you can learn how to improve products, what services customers want, where stumbling blocks exist in your operations, why customers consider switching to your competitors, and much more. Optimizing your Customer Dynamics gives you the ability to not only serve your customers via the communication channel preferred by them in a cost-effective manner, but to act upon the voice of the customer (VoC) to improve business performance. 

Tapping into the VoC requires the capacity to collectively analyze content from all sources of customer contacts, including telephone calls, emails, surveys, and Web-based chats, or, in short, from cross-channel interaction analytics. The key is to transform the wealth of unstructured customer interaction data into a strategically useful form via speech and text mining algorithms, which will fuel drastic improvements in business performance and customer experience. 

Cross-channel analytics is not yet widely employed, but is gaining momentum as a tool for companies to better understand and serve their customers.  According to Frost & Sullivan’s 2009 Multi-Channel Contact Center End-user Survey, “support for email and Web-based collaboration is steadily growing across all verticals and contact center sizes. While only a small number (25%) of companies have currently integrated their customer interaction channels for a unified view of the customer, many more (46%) plan to in the next two years”.

Although VoC is considered extremely important, most organizations don’t effectively incorporate it into company decision-making because of the challenges in capturing and analyzing it across channels on a large scale. Cutting-edge cross-channel analytics solutions are making the power of VoC accessible to every organization with a contact center. Many forward-thinking organizations are embracing this formerly untapped data source, and combining it with other business intelligence to drive even more powerful and actionable insights. For example, by integrating VoC with traditional transactional data, companies are able to gain insights and quickly act upon them to improve customer retention, enhance service quality by market segment or other demographics, and discover opportunities for product improvements. 

Customer-centric organizations have been successfully leveraging cross-channel analytics by targeting specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and by establishing processes to continually track, mine and convert VoC information into clear, actionable data that enables better decisions. Using this type of analytics-based information as part of business operations provides a holistic approach to managing VoC-driven business strategies and, helping organizations to retain valuable customers and grow the business. Organizations using cross-channel analytics to stay on top of Customer Dynamics report a wide range of benefits: greater ability to attract and retain customers, higher lifetime value, greater net promoter scores, more productive and engaged agents, lower agent attrition, lower costs, higher revenue and a healthier bottom line, to name a few.

Read more in the white paper from Peppers & Rogers Group and NICE, discussing how VoC can help revolutionize churn programs.