By Paul Stockford, Saddletree Research
December 15, 2011
I recently submitted the draft of my column for the January 2012 issue of Contact Center Pipeline magazine. In the column I listed the top five trends that I believe will impact the industry in 2012. Topping the list was Voice of the Customer (VoC) Analytics.
It seems my forecast has been validated by yesterday’s announcement from Verint covering enhancements to its VoC solutions suite. Beyond just offering a highly efficient enterprise feedback management (EFM) solution that came as part of the Vovici acquisition in July of this year, Verint has integrated the Vovici EFM solution with its Impact 360® Text AnalyticsTM solution so users can now mine survey results for customer data in the same way they mine postings on social media sites for customer data.
While surveys are typically easier to analyze due to the closed-ended questions that limit response options for survey participants, many surveys offer space for respondents to provide additional, unstructured comments. Customer service intelligence is often overlooked or missed in these comments unless they are manually reviewed and evaluated. This step is often postponed or skipped entirely due to time and cost concerns. As a consequence, valuable customer data goes unused.
Applying text analytics to the unstructured text in a completed survey means that the voice of the customer is heard regardless of where or how that voice is found in the survey process. The need for manual processing has been removed, significantly increasing the probability of valuable data being evaluated rather than overlooked.
Beyond the ability to evaluate unstructured data in survey results, Verint has added the ability to embed Vovici EFM charts into Verint performance management scorecards. Survey data now joins speech analytics, text analytics and performance analytics in scorecards that provide an industry-leading, comprehensive set of customer-centric performance metrics for both strategic and tactical contact center executives.
I recall speaking in a “Voice of the Customer” webinar about five years ago, so the idea of recognizing the value of the VoC isn’t a new one but the tools to actually accomplish VoC objectives are only now becoming available. Verint is clearly on the leading edge of the VoC movement in the contact center, once again demonstrating the ability to bring a concept to reality and create solutions designed to meet the needs of what I foresee as a dynamically evolving industry in the year ahead.