Get Real by Really Listening to Customers
What does it mean to listen to the voice of your customer and, more importantly, why does it matter? At its most basic level, listening to your customers is akin to committing to regular date nights with your spouse or play dates with your kids. While it might not seem significant on a daily or weekly basis, over time your commitment to listening builds strong relationships that allow you to weather, or even prevent, misunderstandings or more serious relationship breakdowns.
Contact centers are where real people have real conversations. Understanding what your customers are saying allows you to monitor their overall satisfaction with your products, services and employees. Quite simply, the contact center is critical in building business relationships or destroying them.
With the right Workforce Optimization (WFO) tools, you and others throughout your organizations can detect patterns over time. If you’re really paying attention, your company can head off a storm by responding to customers’ needs, wants and concerns before clouds of discontentment gather momentum and rain all over your business.
Listening to the voice of your customer and, more importantly, tracking key trends and sharing that information enterprise-wide, can be easy with the right tools. Consider this short list of what we consider to be among the most important WFO software attributes for really listening to the voice of your customer:
1. Capture ALL of your customer feedback
If your WFO solution cannot capture every single customer interaction, you’re left with an incomplete picture. Companies should strive to gather comprehensive feedback.
2. Make feedback collection a single solution
Companies that truly want to comprehensively gather customer feedback should seek a solution that combines different technologies—voice, text, desktop—under a single, unified interface.
3. Keep Total Cost of Ownership Manageable
Integrating all of your customer feedback tools also makes financial sense. Gartner estimates a 20 percent reduction in the total cost of ownership of WFO tools over five years when they’re integrated with each other.
4. Demand flexibility
Sometimes companies limit their WFO choices based on the ACD they use. Big mistake. While an ACD is core to any contact center, today’s innovative WFO solutions are no longer married to specific hardware.
5. Access the information
There’s no point in collecting all your voice of the customer data if it cannot be accessed in useful ways. Use integrated analytics to collect, and make sense of, the information you need. And don’t settle for complicated reports. Clean user interfaces are available that give the right information to the right people at the right time.
6. Ensure benefits are realized
Imagine the enterprise-wide advantages if your WFO solution was integrated with your CRM and ERP systems. We believe customer content in one system should lead to the actual recorded conversations in the others – simply and easily.
7. Expect ease of use
Don’t settle for overly complex tools. Modern architecture in today’s software leads to consistent and reliable updates, and continued innovation from vendors. The best tools are built based on the needs of people.
8. Demand to be heard by your vendor
Those in the customer service business are equally entitled to first-rate customer service. Don’t settle for a WFO vendor who won’t listen to your comments, answer your questions or incorporate your feedback.
If listening, really listening, to the voice of your customer is a radical idea at your company, enlist the support of senior management to make it happen. Research by Forrester proves that executive support builds a foundation for voice of the customer success.
Notes Forrester Analyst Adele Sage, “Executive support helps contact center professionals to put key building blocks in place, such as adequate tools to collect and analyze data and processes to systematically act on it.”
Calabrio provides innovative and visionary WFO and analytics solutions to more than 4,000 clients worldwide. Our clients are integrating their solutions at a rate four times the industry average. Clients tell us what they need, we listen and they win. What could be more real than that? 
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