How to Get Started With Holistic VOC

Today, more than ever, customer loyalty is up for grabs. One bad experience and your competition is just a click away.

That one experience can happen anywhere, because today’s digital-first customer journeys have consumers moving from channel to channel and experiencing your brand along more touchpoints than ever.

Unfortunately, a lot of contact centres may be measuring and responding only to what’s happening at just one customer touchpoint and at one moment in time, with little or no knowledge of the events preceding it.

Often, their voice of the customer (VOC) program is limited to post call surveys. While capturing CSAT and transactional NPS feedback is essential, brand loyalty is put to the test across the entire customer journey with all customer interactions – including social media, text, chat, email, and voice channels. So visibility into each interaction is key.

“Surveys are a great tool for gathering customer feedback. But they’re just one tool in a much larger toolbox,” explains Carlos Robledo Suarez, Experience Consultant

Put your VOC program where it matters most.

A holistic VOC program allows you to gather feedback wherever your customers are. With deeper insights from across the entire customer journey, you’ll better understand where the moments of truth are. This allows you to quickly take action that can transform your customer experiences, reduce churn, and increase customers’ dedication to your brand.

While the contact centre serves as the hub for holistic VOC, your entire organization benefits. Especially when you start with these four steps.

Step 1: Do a Customer Journey Analysis

This will help you really understand who your customers are and how they interact with your brand. It will tell you if you have multiple types of customers. If they need different journeys. And how different touchpoints intersect with each other.

Take a close look at what your customer journeys look like. Identify the moments of truth or key pain points at every step—examining different channels, interactions, sub steps, and more. Then, determine what steps are needed to complete interactions with your business and whether those steps are actionable or not.

This analysis will help you understand the best touchpoints to measure and where action will have the greatest impact.

Step 2: Determine Key Stakeholders and Executive Leadership for Your VOC Program

It’s critical to establish an executive sponsor as well as a program leader for your VOC program. This might be your director of customer experience or a VOC governing board. The key is to determine who owns what, who takes particular actions, and what role the contact centre will play. Typically, your organizational structure and governance team will help answer those questions.

If your contact centre leadership has the power to enact change based on feedback from your VOC, it can play a primary role. Often, other departments need to be involved, too.

It’s a best practice to include customer experience, marketing, and members of your executive team as well, so insights can be implemented into your products and services, sales and marketing, and your overall business strategy.

Having a governance structure that allows you to take what you learn and share it with the right people in your organization at the right time is key to taking meaningful action and closing the loop.

Step 3: Empower People to Act on the Insights

Getting data isn’t hard. It’s what you’re able to do with the data that matters. So even the best holistic VOC program won’t help much if you can’t act on the insights.

When your contact centre operations team is empowered to make decisions in the moment—based on the feedback you’ve gleaned—agents can resolve issues, prevent churn, and turn unhappy customers into brand advocates.

Prompt action extends beyond the contact centre, too. Surfacing timely insights to the appropriate people allows your organization to be more agile—adapting strategies, product development, marketing, and operations to meet your customers where they are.

Step 4: Establish Your Program With a Unified Solution

Having your call centre system in one silo, and your voice of the customer data in another will significantly slow you down. A unified solution brings your customer feedback data together, breaking down barriers and streamlining the insights-to-action process.

“Having your data all together in a good state will kickstart your holistic VOC program faster than you think,” says Robledo Suarez.

Now that you understand how to get started with a holistic VOC program, you might like to dig deeper into the optimal approach for your team.