By 2025, 60% of organizations with voice of the customer (VoC) programs will supplement traditional surveys by analyzing voice and text interactions with customers, according to Gartner, Inc. Business and CX leaders will continue to seek ways to diminish reliance on traditional surveys, while VoC programs will still face constant pressure to demonstrate the value of their programs through improved business outcomes.
“While VoC platform providers have been investing in improved interaction analytics for years, clients will still demand more than just great natural language processing (NLP),” said Augie Ray, vice president analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice. “Already, too much customer insight remains locked in databases, and increasing that amount of unused knowledge will not help. VoC providers must continue to improve their capabilities for how data and insights can be conveyed in usable ways across client organizations.”
Most customer service organizations today are deploying customer surveys, but customer surveys are perceived to bring less value than other methods of VoC collection. In order to remedy this disconnect, complex NLP can derive customer context, emotion and experiences from emails, messages, posts and calls with the 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.
“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, senior director analyst in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Turning voice and text into data is just part of the challenge. Converting that into relevant and actionable knowledge demands careful considerations of the reports, dashboards, alerts and other communication methods.”
With VoC and analytics technology anticipated to have the greatest future growth in development and value, business and CX leaders should keep the following in mind when exploring/expanding these types of projects:
- Utilize existing foundations: 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.
- Prioritize active channels: Inventory all of the sources of potential customer listening posts along the customer journey (e.g., customer service interactions, social media posts, customer community engagement). Prioritize these sources based on the completeness of the narratives, the ability to confirm authentic customers and the value the sources can bring to CX strategy.
- Explore distribution options: 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. Keeping this additional insight locked in databases and hubs won’t improve the value of VoC to the organization.
Additional information is available to Gartner clients in the report: Predicts 2022: Executives Must Shift Greater Focus to Customers and Employees to Drive Growth.
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Contacts
Kelly Blum
Gartner, US
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Matt LoDolce
Gartner, US
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Gloria Omale
Gartner, UK
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As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
