In the last several years digital transformation companies have not only realized the need to mine customer information but also to expedite internal re-engineering through powerful analytics tools.

The three-pronged process of Voice of Customer Analytics (VoCA) includes

• Collating structured and unstructured data.
• Analysing the data with powerful analytics tools.
• Transforming the insights through workflows.

Working towards a robust VoCA program can clearly separate customer experience leaders from laggards. According to Forrester, customer experience leaders grow revenue five times faster than CX laggards, drive higher brand preference and brand referrals. A Harvard Business Review article  “How the Meaning of Digital Transformation Has Evolved” also backs the measurable value of a VoC strategy: Top performers in a (PwC) survey—those reporting revenue growth and profit margin increases above 5% for the past three years and expected revenue growth of at least 5% for the next three years—have a better understanding of the human experience that surrounds digital technology. These companies prioritize user experience specialists and creating better customer experience through their digital initiatives.

Infact, organisations don’t realise it yet but a vast majority of customer content is in their internal data- the e-mails, sms and voice calls. If you compare a call over a tweet- a five minute call entails 1000 words v/s 10 words over a tweet. More than 90% of the voice of customer analytics is internal data.

Our large-scale study of more than 36,000 consumers across 18 countries that challenges all of us to think about how we can deliver a customer experience that will truly engage customers from today into 2030 and beyond predicts-

• Customer service in 2030 will certainly rely greatly on machine learning, deep learning and deep reinforcement learning.
• Almost seven out of every 10 consumers (68%) want their service experience to be personalised which means that organisations need to deploy sophisticated speech, text, social media, sentiment analytics tools to be able to deliver data driven services.

As a case of successful VoCA implementation, the Bank Of Montreal analyses over a million calls each year to understand customer behavior and sentiments. The bank also earmarked-

• Top five processes per line of business which were responsible for repeat calls.
• The Bank was also able to identify top digital challenges of the customers.
• Key detractors through campaign analytics.

Closer home Sutherland Global, a digital operations and digital transformation company, operating out of 19 countries and clocking 43 million transactions a month deploys speech analytics to help its customers in BFSI and telecom verticals to gain near real-time insights to fulfill-

• Collections’ compliance adherence
• Customer retention
• To move up their customers’ value chain
• Training needs of their of their agents.

Within 12 months of deploying multiple channel analytics a leading bank in UK observed-

• 12-15% reduction in customers’ switching channels
• 18% reduction in repeat calls
• 10-15% uplift in the use of self-serve channels.

Myriad customer feedback across multiple channels can be one of the top challenges to deploy voice of customer program as customer feedback can be-

• Solicited and unsolicited feedback (such as social media tweets)
• Structured and unstructured feedback (such as complaint calls)
• Direct and implied feedback (correlating behavior patterns such as a product purchase or cancellation)
• Overall brand perception and interaction-level feedback that evaluates perceptions for a specific interaction (such as check out or customer support)

VoCA integrated with predictive, prescriptive and descriptive analytics can help organisations to devise small loop and large loop processes. As a reactive tool, small loop actions taken after a customer provides a poor rating or reports a concern. Small loop processes are usually led by an individual or a small group. Large Loop processes analyze trends in small loop actions to determine the root cause. Once the root cause is identified, organizations may either reduce or eliminate small loop actions. Changes triggered large loop processes often involve new policies, processes, technology, pricing, and can span across organizational functions.

As Warren Buffet says “Don’t satisfy your customer delight them.” Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs empowers organizations to embrace a data-driven approach to improve the overall customer experience and building a customer-centric culture across the organization.