Over the next three years, business and customer experience (CX) leaders plan to seek ways to diminish reliance on traditional surveys, as 60% of organizations with voice of the customer (VoC) programs will supplement traditional surveys by analyzing voice and text interactions with customers by 2025.
“Predicts 2022: Executives Must Shift Greater Focus to Customers and Employees to Drive Growth,” a research report commissioned by Gartner, revealed that while VoC programs will still face constant pressure to demonstrate the value of their programs through improved business outcomes, they will be incorporated into existing strategies in a major way. As 67% of marketing organizations struggle to keep up with changing customer needs, VoC collection, such as natural language processing (NLP), can better derive customer context, emotion and experiences from emails, messages, social posts and calls with the company.
According to the report, most customer service organizations today are deploying customer surveys, but they’re perceived to bring less value than other methods of VoC collection. To remedy this disconnect, complex NLP can derive customer context, emotion and experiences from emails, messages, posts and calls with a company. Not only can speech and text analytics tools utilizing NLP provide insight with post-transaction analysis, but it can also provide real-time insight that can be used in the moment to impact CX.
With the research finding that VoC and analytics technology are anticipated to have the greatest future growth in development and value, business and CX leaders should:
- Implement speech and text analytics by utilizing the capabilities in VoC or interaction recording tools, buying new analytics tools or hiring staff to tune and analyze existing tools to improve understanding of the CX;
- Inventory all the sources of potential customer listening posts along the customer journey (customer service interactions, social media posts and customer community engagement) to identify the most active channels; and
- Develop strategies for how this burgeoning source of customer insight will be distributed to employees and internal stakeholders so that it is relevant, intuitive, actionable, applicable and embedded into their daily jobs.
“Those responsible for VoC programs must consider the implications of disseminating this new insight to different business partners in different ways that are relevant to their jobs,” said Deborah Alvord, Sr. Director Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice, in a statement. “Turning voice and text into data is just part of the challenge. Converting that into relevant and actionable knowledge demands careful considerations of reports, dashboards, alerts and other communication methods.”
