Leverage the Voice of the Customer

Bruce Temkin, an analyst for Forrester Research, recently blogged about his report “Sixteen Voice of the Customer Recommendations,” commenting on the lessons that top companies have learned from implementing voice of the customer [VoC] programs. (View Temkin’s posts on these blogs: Customer Experience Matters and the 1to1 Media Blog.)

Temkin quotes a healthcare company about the power of voice of the customer data:

You have to democratize the VoC feedback. When you put the VoC data in the hands of the organization, you enable them to make interpretations and to contextualize the voice of the customer into the business problems they’re trying to solve.

Enabling teams across your organization to access and utilize direct customer feedback can be invaluable to a corporation. What may be a simple comment or suggestion that is dismissed by one team can be a valuable insight or cost-saving idea to another team. In his blog posts, Temkin suggests that companies should “embrace unstructured data,” provide “extremely wide access to VoC insights” and “actively ‘push’ VoC insights to business partners.”

Unstructured data, like call recordings, can provide a wealth of knowledge to companies; all from interactions that you are already having within your enterprise. Engaging speech analytics services can be an affordable option for effectively culling through hours of call data for information.

Providing access to customer interactions, and pushing information out to business partners, can be achieved through exporting relevant call recordings. CallRex Call Recording software, for example, allows users to export call recordings as a standard .WAV file, which can be e-mailed or attached to CRM records and can be played back using any standard desktop media player.

How are you leveraging the voice of the customer across your enterprise? Do teams across your organization have access to the customer interactions that are already occurring within your teams?