The power of voice in CX: How to derive real value

Customer-facing businesses have more data available to them than ever before due to systems accessibility, increased channels, and the overall complexity of today’s enterprise ecosystem. This data is the oil in the business’s CX engine and can provide insightful details of every interaction along a customer’s journey. The most telling of all is voice data, which can relay context, sentiment, intent, emotion, and actions, providing real intelligence and meaningful feedback that empowers an organisation’s ability to predict consumer behaviour, improve decision making, and identify critical areas of need to meet the ever-changing demands of their customers.

Providing access to analysis

The human element of voice – today, making up an estimated 70% of customer interactions - allows us to uncover what a customer feels, how they perceive our service, and what they seek so that they remain satisfied and loyal to us. Important voice data, heretofore locked away and held hostage in proprietary storage formats and platforms, is now able to be structured and presented to businesses in its entirety, across the enterprise, allowing them to derive real value from it.

Is “good enough” good enough?

High quality, stereo audio (in real-time) is essential to delivering reliable, accurate voice data into enterprise business applications so that the output is representative of the true interaction taking place between you and your customer. Without meaningful, usable data, how can you get actionable, transformative insights from your BI or analytics tools? The value of this analysis is in the detail. It’s looking into whether the customer felt satisfied with the experience or would prefer to do business with you differently. Or whether your resource (agent, self-service, BOT, et al) did the job to provide that satisfied outcome for both sides. These insights can easily be pushed into your digital solutions to serve the demands of your customer, the way they may want it, and at a lower ‘cost-to-serve’ to your business - that’s the ideal outcome!  But this outcome can only be achieved if the source data is of the quality needed to deliver the results sought.

Top tips

For CX managers considering a voice data solution, the following elements are key:

• High quality matters and should be a core focus for anyone deciding on a solution.
• Open, flexible, adaptable systems should be of primary importance to ensure interoperability and flexibility as changes occur.
• Understanding your strategy and vision and ensuring it’s clearly shared across the business is crucial - data collected is of huge value to other parts of the business, from marketing to sales to HR and across risk/compliance.

As voice data, and the benefits its analysis can bring, becomes more top of mind for business executives, it is those businesses that understand how to maximise the opportunities available that will thrive and become their own industry’s CX leader.

Paul Beyer, Enterprise Director (US), Red Box