Are You a Voice of the Customer (VoC) Superhero?

As a contact center leader, your customers love working with you. Your agents love working for you. Your peers love working alongside you. Under your guidance, your team consistently achieves top performance scores and high customer satisfaction ratings. You seem able to accomplish whichever task is put in front of you, and you relish new challenges that come your way. You’re truly a rock-star contact center manager or supervisor.

Out of everyone working in your organization, it seems like you at a minimum should be anointed with “Voice of the Customer (VoC) Superhero” status, right?

Not necessarily.

Achieving this kind of status requires much more than that, and contact center analytics plays a key role. Do you have what it takes?

1. Are you savvy about contact center analytics?

It’s common to find confusion in your contact center about what “analytics” really is, or what it can be. Many people, particularly those with finance backgrounds, equate the term with hard numbers, not realizing that today’s rich analytics can be so much more than that.

With the emergence and evolution of specialized analytics technologies—such as speech analytics, text analytics, desktop analytics and sentiment analysis—the definition, purpose and outputs of analytics in your contact center have moved beyond simply hard data to true representation. Now, you can get a truly authentic flavor of your customers across all the channels by which you serve them. But only if you use these technologies, and use them properly.

If you want to be a VoC superhero, at a minimum you need to:

• Use your own analytics savvy to help stakeholders overcome predispositions they may have to a numbers-only approach to contact center analysis.
• Implement and continually optimize multichannel communications tightly tied to specialized analytics tools that measure those channels’ usage, interdependencies and churn.
• Keep an open mind when scrutinizing calls and other customer interactions—you never know what you might unintentionally learn.

2. Do you plan and prepare properly for analytics projects?

Inadequate pre- and post-deployment planning sabotages more analytics projects than you can possibly imagine. That’s because it’s human nature to resist change, and analytics projects fundamentally change how companies operate.

So, if you want to be a VoC superhero, at a minimum you need to:

• Put together a cross-functional team that will guarantee your analytics projects succeed—a mix of both formal and informal leadership, subject matter experts, advocates, analysts, coaches and “cheerleaders.”
• Make sure you have enough initial and ongoing funding to support the projects’ needs.
• Encourage everyone in the company to suggest possible analytics projects, then maintain an open-door policy—and open mind—when you receive this input.
• Support and encourage analysts prone to burnout by empowering them and providing them with ongoing training.

3. Have you implemented a formalized process for your analytics projects?

Too many requests and too many distractions easily can derail even the best-intentioned analytics project. Scope creep is natural, but a ruthless focus on what really needs to be done must be maintained.

That’s why, if you want to be a VoC superhero, at a minimum you need to:

• Create a formalized, closed-loop project plan and process for your analytics projects.
• Identify and stay focused on the most important and/or most immediately impactful projects, and close them out before moving onto something else.
• Establish baselines, then measure and record results against those baselines on an ongoing basis, and distribute the findings on a weekly basis to your stakeholders.
• Stay attuned with shifting corporate goals and strategies, and prioritize analytics projects according to which ones most strongly tie back to company goals.

Think you’re ready for superhero status? Learn how in the Calabrio ebook, 3 Steps to Becoming a Voice of the Customer Superhero.

Richard McElroy

Richard McElroy leads Calabrio’s Center of Excellence for Analytics based in Vancouver, BC Canada, as well as Calabrio’s Innovation Center. He brings over 20 years of high tech and Business Intelligence software industry experience. As an experienced, hands-on senior leader, Richard is instrumental in evolving the development and marketing of Calabrio Advanced Reporting – a multi-tiered contact center Business Intelligence platform that delivers data integration, reporting, analytics and information management capabilities.