Is Your Customer Support Team Listening to The Voice of Customer?

“Once, when I had called the provider to block my company credit card, I was put on hold for 45 minutes by the agent. I didn't really have any other choice than to wait and suffer the ordeal! I realized that I wasn’t the first or only one who suffered this experience. I blocked the card, emailed my experience, and waited for their response. The provider never came back to me and apologized for their nonchalance. I vowed to tell at least 50 people what I went through…”- Anonymous

In the era of “instant everything’, how could customer support teams stay behind in their Voice of Customer (VoC) initiatives???

Let’s consider these scenarios –?

Your NPS Promoter and CSAT scores are at their worst this quarter.

Your top customers are complaining more about the quality of service than about the product.

Your agents are unable to solve more than 50% of customer queries without the intervention of the team leads or managers.?

Your employee attrition rate has spiked by more than 100% in the last 3 months.

Despite adopting the best contact center communication practices, your churn rate is uncontrollably high and your service costs are going through the roof!

All these questions could point to one thing – Your customer support team is ignoring the voice of the customers.?

You are not alone when it comes to suffering the whiplash of ignoring the VoC.?

It’s a double whammy for most!?

A majority of brands see customers moving to competitors despite playing by the book; and, their top agents jump ship when this happens with no visible solution or leadership accountability.?

What is the Voice of Customer??

The Voice of Customer is a detailed snapshot of what your customers think and say about your product, service, employees, and experiences. It provides granular-level insights into the customer’s preferences, complaints, and much more based on data1 collected from feedback forms, surveys, telechat, interviews, polls, and other interactions.??

When customers share their voice with your organization, they expect you to not just listen and acknowledge their choices, but also act instantaneously.?

To prevent customer churn, you need to refine your Voice of Customer (VoC) program and usher in technology-driven customer support .

So, how do you actually develop a voice of the customer program at your contact center?

Salesforce's Feedback Management System is one of the best VoC platforms that I have reviewed recently. It enables the Customer Service teams in designing personalized surveys and polls. All the data that is collected from the system is actually fed to the customer relationship management database, to further refine the interactions at every stage of the customer journey.

You can refer to this useful Salesforce VoC video for more information on how to kick-start your VoC campaign.

https://www.salesforce.com/video/7831144/

How to use VoC to improve the quality of service and support?

90% of US-based customers choose an online product or service that promises to deliver immediate response to their queries and quickly resolve them. They expect the brands to not only understand the pain points but also come up with appropriate solutions. World-class brands differentiate themselves from their competitors by delivering exceptional and consistent customer experience (CX). In a blink of an eye, they respond to urgent queries from customers and keep them engaged with the brand at all times.?

Building personalized human connections with their customers comes naturally to these brands. They incorporate the voice of the customers to build and improve their customer relationships.

Is there a Potter spell that you can pick from the winning brands to keep your customers enchanted?

How do these brands manage to keep their customers happy??

And, how do they deal with a disgruntled customer??

Let’s answer these one by one.?

First, winning brands have an experience-centric culture that prioritizes customer feedback over everything else. Customer Support teams that invest in a feedback program witness reduced churn, increased employee engagement, and decreased cost of operations. Moreover, having a Voice of Customer program increases the chances of up-selling and cross-selling by up to 20% per customer, a strong signal to prove that when companies collect and act on customer feedback, they can fix any broken piece in the customer journey and improve customer loyalty.

Answering the second question, when you listen and act on the VoC, it leads to an empowered CX roadmap that resonates emotionally with customers. Satisfied customers are willing to pay more for a product and also convince others to choose the same. Customer support teams play a big role in turning ideas into actions with the VoC data they collect across various touch-points during the end-to-end customer journey. You can ace your customer support goals2

by linking customer data collected through the VoC programs with your CRM.

Now, to answer the third question – “How do they deal with a disgruntled customer?”

Winning brands leverage intelligent technologies like deep learning and robotic process automation (RPA) to seamlessly augment the skills and expertise of their agents. Automating routine tasks and empowering your support agents with new-age collaboration tools can solve all your major headaches, ensuring your team functions more efficiently than they previously did.??

More than anything else, you need empathy, something that can’t be ingrained in a system.

Use technology… Empower your agents.?

Focus on strong CX-centric leadership to inculcate listening and learning at the heart of your customer support program.

VoC best practices for the modern Customer Support teams

The efficient use of VoC data should be a company-wide effort. When every department listens to the customers, your support efforts become laser-focused and effective.?

Here’re the five best practices to empower your customer support team with VoC data:

1. Improve collaboration and communication across functions
2. Streamline your technology stack and integrations
3. Make social listening your priority
4. Fuse CX with employee experience (EX)
5. Link your financial goals with your VoC efforts

To match customers’ expectations, customer support teams could re-engineer the existing workflows and focus on “listening” to customer’s voices and sentiments. It isn’t an easy task to accomplish. However, with the help of technology and human ownership, you can set up the foundation for a great CX-centric brand and see your fortunes growing with a smiling community of loyal customers and motivated agents.?

Did you know that a leading CX firm Medallia helped an insurance company improve the lives of its customers by listening to their voice! There are countless other examples in the customer service industry that I review every week.

Speaking regularly to the CX mavens actually is a great way to understand how customer service teams can improve their Voice of Customer programs in 2023. That's exactly what I do...

Stay on top of every customer support trend in 2023 with me and my published works.

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References:

1. Shields, K. (2021) Chapter 3: Managing a customer service team, Customer Centric Strategy. Available at: https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/customercentricstrategy/chapter/chapter-3-managing-a-customer-service-team/ (Accessed: 24 July 2023).
2. The what, how, and why of Voice of Customer (VOC) market research (no date) Market Research Company New York. Available at: https://www.driveresearch.com/market-research-company-blog/the-what-how-and-why-of-voice-of-customer-voc-market-research/ (Accessed: 24 July 2023).