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Voice Of Customer (VOC)
How Can It Be Implemented at your Contact Centre
Dr. Brownell O'Connor
The Contact Center Doctor
G-CEM International Partner (Ireland)
www.brownell.ie
This article is exclusively written for G-CEM.
"Voice of the customer" means different things to different people. For some, it is the process of carrying out customer surveys and resolving areas of dissatisfaction. For others, it is a series of processes to capture multichannel customer satisfaction and behavioural data, to analyse that data, and to implement recovery solutions that maximise the customers' lifetime value. I believe VOC needs to be far more detailed than the mere process of listening to customer complaints and responding accordingly, as the results need to be both scientifically AND psychologically reliable and the results should lead to action.
That serves to make VOC a pretty expensive initiative within the organisation. Customer surveys are not inexpensive and they are often fraught with inaccuracy, bias and other value-diluting errors. Of course, the VOC initiative is a very critical component of the overall CEM initiative so thankfully, while VOC may not be inexpensive, it does deliver VERY palpable, tangible, positive results.
The implementation cost of VOC can be reduced and the accuracy of the delivered results can be improved greatly in organisations that operate call centres and contact centres. Brad Cleveland of ICMI supports the concept of the call centre becoming the "voice of the customer consultant" within the organisation. One reason for this is that, in most companies, call centre staff deal with more customers per day than any other customer-facing business unit. The staff, therefore, know what drives customer advocacy, what leads to increased customer defections and how customers can be encouraged to spend more of their hard-earned cash.
Almost all customer contact centres have an equipped and resourced quality assurance department (QA). The QA process is usually underpinned by a very capable call recording system that can record both sides of every telephone call. Advanced systems will also record the agent's desktop in order to ensure that the agent was accessing/interpreting data correctly and the most advanced systems even offer voice analytics that automatically assess the agent's call quality and detect particular points of interest such as arguments, misunderstanding and in some cases even rudeness between the agent and the customer.
In most organisations, a scorecard drives the QA program. Quality analysts select recorded calls at random and with the use of the scorecard, they award a quality score to the call (see sample, table 1). Call centre agents are often incentivised or, at the very least, performance managed on the basis of their QA scores. Agents typically score points for listening well, using the customer's name, following correct procedures, etc. Many agents describe QA as the "AGENT POLICE". When I meet QA analysts I regularly ask them to describe their job and many say that their job is "to find agent mistakes".
QA may be defined as:
A program for the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service, or facility to ensure that standards of quality are being met. [Source Mariam Webster Dictionary]
Table 1: Sample Call Quality form
The "agent police" process does not fit into this definition as the "agent police" assumes that the recommendations made by the company are infallible. QA (agent police) analysts often admit to only listening to the agent and not really remembering what the customer was saying or doing in a call. By taking this approach the analysts are failing to capture the REALLY valuable VOC intelligence regarding the customer's reaction to the agent's behaviours, suggestions, actions and reactions.
Like VOC, call recording systems, call analysis systems, scorecards and all the associated databases and reporting systems are not inexpensive and by using these systems and processes as "agent police", organisations are failing to maximise the ROI of their call centre, the call centre technology and indeed, the informal knowledge that resides within the confines of this "oracle of customer experience".
By harnessing more functionality from call centre QA, organisations can improve the ROI of both call centre QA AND the VOC initiative, while simultaneously increasing the accuracy of the VOC "data stream", including the validation of management recommendations and targets.
The concept is simply one of "double-loop" quality assurance as opposed to the "single-loop" methodology deployed in most call centres. It requires a few additions to the QA scorecard and an acceptance that the time taken to analyse calls will increase slightly. The results should be communicated not only to the agents, coaches, trainers and operations managers by way of performance feedback, but it should also be communicated as valid CEM inputs to the CEM team in addition to the marketing team. It will necessitate additional training for QA analysts and management will need to break any lingering "agent police" attitude within the QA department.
The key to successfully "morphing" the QA process into a VOC initiative is to, at the very least, measure the customer's "emotional level" at each stage of the call. The scoring system should be simple, such as 1-5, where one is very angry/unhappy and 5 is very happy/delighted. The QA analyst judges the customer's emotion at each stage of the call. Because the metric is subjective, the actual score is not taken as significant but variances are analysed. As a further enhancement, the customer can be prompted to opt-in to a call quality, exit survey. The results of the exit survey can be analysed against the customer's emotion during the call.
Now, it becomes possible to assess, for example, that "customers who are satisfied with a particular part of a call are more likely to be satisfied with the overall call". This can not only improve customer advocacy but can also result in significant reductions in overall service costs without negatively impacting customer behaviour. As part of the CEM initiative, this data provides more input for agents, trainers, coaches, marketing, sales, finance etc. This data is the very essence of "BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE" and "CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE".
Many call centres have RIDICUOUS QA processes. For example, some QA processes mandate that the agent use the customer's name three times during a call. In such circumstances, when, towards the end of a call, an agent realises that he or she has forgotten to use the customer's name he simply says "Dr. Brownell? Dr. Brownell? . . . . Ah yes, Dr. Brownell" and now, in the purely legal sense of the word he has achieved his target by using the name three times. An agent can thus score 100% without adding any experiential value to the call. By analysing the customer's emotional changes and comparing the results to an overall satisfaction survey it is possible to uncover situations where agents are scoring very high but the customers are still not satisfied and are less loyal as a result.
Management must accept the fact that just because they recommend something should be done in a particular way, does not mean that it is right for the customer. It is imperative that QA measure the quality of service provided relative to the management prescribed standards and models, in addition to assessing whether or not the management prescribed models and standards are actually achieving the overall strategic objectives.
Here is an actual example taken from an African MNO. In the first slide the customer emotion starts quite high and it escalates during the helping phase of the call.
In the second slide, the customer begins the call in an angry state and the agent performs well until the helping stage. The agent is achieving minimum performance standards but is failing to have an impact on the customer. This analysis highlighted a very obvious point - HELPING is the most important phase of the call. It is WHAT WE DO. If we don't get the helping piece right, none of the other points about thanking the customer, using their name, etc. have any impact.
Anecdotally, customers were suggesting that the company was not very good at fixing problems but statistically agents were achieving the required performance standards. The root cause of the problem lay in the fact that the agents were great engineers but were not great "people" people. Their emotional soft skills were very weak. Even though they were doing nothing wrong they were not projecting themselves well to the customers. They were re-trained to deal with the customers' emotions before dealing with the technical problems and customer advocacy rates soared. The company was over-focused on statistical KPI's and had little focus on measuring the all-important, emotional soft skills.
In essence, companies are spending lots of money on call recording systems, email transcript systems and other QA tools that are maintaining records of what customers are ACTUALLY doing and ACTUALLY saying. Then the same companies are wasting enormous resources attempting to emulate the recording systems through customer surveys. Surveys that are sometimes, at best, the customer's best guess of how they will react to a set of circumstances. If you have a recording system, why not double the system ROI, improve VOC data reliability and reduce VOC expenses by simply harnessing and capturing the data that is already available to you.
The VOICE of the CUSTOMER is sitting in your call recording system - why waste resources trying to re-create it?
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About the Author
While his professional career began as an electronic engineer, Brownell O'Connor, The Contact Centre Doctor has earned a reputation in the world of CRM and customer contact. Brownell has been working in the customer contact industry since 1990 and in that time he has worked with over 150 call centre operations on virtually every continent. In 1989, long before CRM was a definitive Term, Brownell was developing and implementing CRM solutions in Pizza Hut call centres around the world.
Brownell sold his first call centre technology company in 1996. With an impressive array of blue-chip clients, the company provided an array of hardware and software, CRM, call centre management solutions, Computer Telephony Integration solutions and automated service solutions. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, they served a global industry with offices in North America, Thailand, UK, and Poland. Most implementations were "build, operate, transfer" contracts and it will be no surprise that the company owned and operated its own call centre in Dublin. Interestingly, Brownell had a huge hurdle to overcome in order to gain the support of the Irish government agencies - he had to introduce Government officials to the concept of call centres and now, Ireland has the reputation for being Europe's call centre capital.
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