The marketers and some vendors would have you believe that the “voice of the customer” is synonymous with what in itself is a highly misunderstood term – the 360-degree view of the customer i.e. a report or analysis that tells you everything about your customers. In one way I think it is, but it is not the whole story. If you think about it, your customers, or at least a significant subset, talk to your company every day. They tell you what you are doing right and wrong, they tell you what they feel and what they might do next, they ask you for information and sometimes give you information, and sometimes they even place a new order or cancel one. This happens every day in the call center; the problem is that is where most of it stays.

The problem is this “voice of the customer” is either lost when the call finishes or for a few companies it is locked into call recordings which hardly ever are listened to. For the few companies that have deployed call recording they listen to but a very few calls, and the main reason is to listen to “the voice of the agent” as part of agent quality monitoring.

Recent research I did into customer experience management shows this is about to change. Call recording technology has matured to the point where it is affordable enough to record all calls and 11% of the most mature companies have already seen the advantages of new developments in speech analysis techniques. These now go way beyond word recognition and can now pick out aspects of customer conversations from phrases, their pitch and tone, trends and much more. They very latest developments work on phonetic search techniques that can indeed unlock the real voice of your customers.

Now is the time to really unlock the voice of your customers as he could help you survive in these challenging times.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Richard Snow - VP & Research Director