Bring together the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee to gain a more complete view of customer experiences
By Leonard Klie
"VoC and VoE leverage all the same foundations."
"[Companies] are giving employees the same level of importance as customers."
By now, companies have seen the value in capturing and acting on the the voice of their customers. However, there is growing recognition of the value of listening to the voice of the employee (VoE) as well. Employee engagement, experts posit, is just as vital to every company’s success, and has been shown to have a direct impact on employee retention, thereby reducing turnover costs and driving a more customer--focused workforce and business environment.
A happy and engaged employee does have an impact on whether the customer has an enjoyable experience, says Chris Cottle, executive vice president of marketing at Allegiance, a provider of enterprise VoC and VoE feedback management solutions.
There’s also a financial incentive for companies to listen to employees: Companies with engaged employees and customers are three times more profitable, according to Cottle.
“It makes…sense, he says. “After all, the most critical component of any company is its people.”
Employees—especially those in the contact center—are often the first to interact with customers and shape how the customer perceives the company, the brand, and its products or services. Because of these early interactions, these employees have a lot of knowledge about what frustrates and delights customers. If there’s a problem or a concern, they are typically the first to know. As such, they can typically identify problems days—even weeks—ahead of customers and can get organizations to provide positive customer experiences proactively, rather than reactively.
Organizations such as NASA, Xerox, Best Buy, and the U.S. Postal Service have recognized the correlation between VoC and VoE insight, funneled through a new type of solution called voice of the customer through the employee (VoCE).
These companies are not alone. Many executives are starting to look at VoCE, amplifying the insight gathered from customers with insight from customer-facing employees. After all, VoC, VoE, and now VoCE provide different views of the same subject, and bringing all the data together in one implementation will help garner a better understanding of customer experiences and uncover new ways to drive change in the company.
The premise behind VoCE is simple: While customers who provide feedback are only able to talk about their own individual experiences, employees on the front lines are ideally positioned to recognize patterns based on their conversations with the many customers who call them every day. Not only can they identify common issues, but they can also assess how important these issues are to customers, help to understand what’s causing them in the first place, and provide insight into how customers would like to see those issues corrected.
Granted, contact centers today have access to all sorts of analytics to mine voice recordings, text, the Web, social media, and other customer touch points, so they can spot trends and respond to issues more quickly. The importance of analytics cannot be overstated as a way to extract call content, identify emerging issues or concerns, and quantify the number of calls regarding a specific problem, but getting the information directly from contact center agents in almost near real time allows the company to act on and resolve issues much faster.
And while VoE and VoCE are somewhat roundabout ways to get at customer sentiment, they can be more reliable than VoC solutions alone.
“Information from customers alone is not always accurate,” says Tore Haggren, senior vice president of VoE solutions at Confirmit. “The customer might not be completely up-front.”
Plus, customer feedback is often slanted. It’s a well--established fact that customers are more likely to complain about a company than they are to issue praise.
Adele Sage, an analyst at Forrester Research, says companies should really be collecting two types of input from their customer-facing employees. Employees, she says, can have great ideas for customer experience improvements, such as how to fix broken processes. At the same time, they hear feedback directly from customers.
She suggests that companies should not only have the mechanisms in place to allow employees to share those insights, but they should also be augmenting that information with their VoC data.
“You can compare external [VoC]and internal [VoE] data to get a better and more complete picture of the overall customer experience,” says Koren Stucki, director of VoC solutions marketing at Verint Systems.
But attaining that level of engagement might not be as easy as it sounds. Managing an ongoing, committed VoCE program can be challenging, particularly for companies with large numbers of employees or workforces scattered across many locations and geographies.
That was certainly the case at Best Buy. In 2011, the company launched the My Customer platform to give its more than 100,000 frontline employees at roughly 1,500 stores across the nation an opportunity to share what they hear and learn about the company during their more than 1 billion interactions with customers each year. Included in the My Customer platform is a Web-based widget that invites real-time reporting of insights and issues, an ongoing feedback loop with corporate leadership, and a dedicated team to take all the feedback and funnel it to the right areas for action. On the back end, text analytics further identifies trends and spikes that can then be combined with other key customer insights. The platform allows everyone to see collated information from all of the stores.
A year into the program, Best Buy’s platform was receiving an average of 6,000 employee submissions per week. That kind of information would have cost thousands of dollars had Best Buy instead turned to an outside research firm to collect it.
Steve Wallin led Best Buy’s efforts to create and launch the VoCE program while he was vice president of consumer insights strategy and execution. He described the program as “a unique, always-on approach to gathering insights from the front lines to help guide business decisions and allow corporate/store leaders to engage employees on a variety of business topics.”
Information gathered through the portal has affected a wide range of issues, from store signage to national promotions, according to Wallin, who has since left the company to cofound Frontline Insights, a VoC and VoE consulting firm.
Retailers such as Best Buy, while certainly prime candidates for deploying VoCE solutions, aren’t the only ones that are doing it. Other industries that have seen early adoption include travel, hospitality, telecommunications, software, technology, and financial services, according to Cottle. “The companies that are doing it most are those with large customer-facing operations and those with many high-value customers,” he explains.
Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), an information technology and business process outsourcing firm owned by Xerox, even goes so far as to train its more than 74,000 customer care agents working in nearly 100 countries to recognize nuances within customer conversations that could help them quickly identify and respond to customer needs.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) faces an even bigger challenge than Best Buy and ACS. It has roughly 700,000 employees and more than 40,000 locations nationwide, and a customer base that includes virtually every home and business in America. Yet Verint’s Enterprise Feedback Management solution aggregates all of its VoC and VoE feedback into consolidated monthly reports that are sent to all postmasters for action.
Verint—which in mid-2011, through its acquisition of Vovici, beefed up its own offerings for executives looking to gather, manage, and understand customer feedback—can do this for the USPS and other clients because its VoC and VoE programs leverage the same technologies for analytics, surveying, enterprise feedback management, case management, workforce optimization, and other critical components, according to Stucki.
Verint launched its VoE product in August 2013 as part of its Business Impact Solutions portfolio. The VoE solution uses the company’s Voice of the Customer Analytics technology to provide companies with a single, holistic view of both the VoE and VoC.
“VoC and VoE leverage all the same foundations,” Stucki says. “The technology is the same and can be centralized on one platform, which makes it easier to measure and analyze.”
Departmental Change
That hasn’t always been the case. In early VoE deployments, “a lot of times, we’d see VoE start in the human resources department and VoC managed in the customer service or marketing departments,” Stucki says. Program data seldom left those silos.
Stucki is confident, though, that those walls are coming down. “You might still see VoC and VoE managed in different departments, but there will be more alignment of the two,” she says. “VoC and VoE are coming together as one program or as a coordinated effort between teams.”
The good news is that the change is being driven from the top down and from the bottom up, Cottle says. “The C-level, especially, is realizing that the voices of the customer and the employee matter,” he states.
That’s really the only way for these types of programs to succeed, according to Mike Maughan, product marketing manager for employee insights at Qualtrics, a provider of enterprise surveying platforms. “It needs management buy-in,” he states emphatically.
Cottle sees two elements contributing to the convergence of VoC and VoE that is underway. The first is demand, driven by a change in how companies approach customer feedback. “In the past, there was a lot of focus on an outside---in approach,” Maughan explains.
Companies developed an obsession with external voices. They allocated—and still allocate—great amounts of time and money trying to talk to and engage with customers, developing command centers, social media programs, micro-sites, communities, in-person events, unique loyalty programs, and a host of other things to find out exactly what customers think of them. In the process, they often overlooked their employees.
“Now, we’re seeing more of an inside-out approach,” Maughan says.
Stucki agrees. “There’s more of an interest in getting transactional feedback, like after a customer calls into a contact center,” she says. “And [companies] are giving employees the same level of importance as customers.”
Stucki has also observed “a lot more effort to align VoC and VoE, and a lot more attention on using both together to help the business focus on the areas where it can have the greatest impact.”
Another factor is a desire to get as much information as possible. Stucki notes that this is one of the biggest changes she’s seen in the VoE arena. “A lot of companies only focused in the past on annual surveys, but now we’re seeing a lot more of a focus on pulse surveys,” she says. “In addition to annual surveys, they’re reaching out more often to get at important issues within the company.”
The other driver is the technology itself. “The [software-as-a-service] model has democratized it,” Cottle says.
What typically happens now, Cottle points out, is that one division within the company buys the platform and then other groups within the company buy licenses and run it on their own. “You usually get a customer advocacy group within the company, but then marketing, operations, customer service and support, and even HR come on board,” he says.
And the technology has greater segmentation capabilities today as well. With Verint’s solution, for example, users can segment and survey employees based on attributes, such as demographics, management level, department, location, and tenure to create employee personas and gain more targeted insight and actions.
Whose Voice Is It?
So who, then, should own the VoCE insights? It really doesn’t matter, most experts agree. “You can still have separate organizations, but they should share the information and the applications,” Cottle says.
“You can tweak it for specific use cases, but everyone should be on the same basic platform,” Haggren adds.
Karine Del Moro, vice president of marketing at Confirmit, suggests implementing a VoCE program across the entire company. It shouldn’t be solely an HR initiative, she says, but an integral part of the company culture.
“The most effective program has cross-department ownership,” Maughan adds. “It needs buy-in from all over the company, and the key to this is that teams need to work together.”
Solutions also need to work together. The collection mechanisms should be the same for VoC and VoE feedback, and gathering feedback should occur with the same frequency. “You should be ready, willing, and able to collect employee feedback at any time,” Cottle says. “You should allow that dialogue to happen all the time.”
Naturally, companies can’t collect employee feedback all the time; after all, they want their employees doing the jobs for which they were hired, first and foremost. “But you can survey employees after specific events, finding out what they saw, what they heard, how they felt, what they think they could have done to improve the customer experience,” Haggren says.
He suggests having an open, easy-to-use Web surveying platform where employees can go when they have a few minutes of downtime.
Maughan says companies can also require contact center agents to fill out quick surveys after every call. The surveys can be as simple as one or two questions. “If you keep it simple, it won’t take a lot of time to complete, maybe ten to twenty seconds or so,” he says.
No matter how surveys are administered, though, they need to be consistent throughout the employee’s life cycle with the company, Maughan adds. And “it needs to be standardized across the company.”
To further increase use by employees, management should explain how VoE and VoCE programs will help them do their jobs better. It’s almost essential to close the loop with employees and tell them exactly what is being done with the feedback they’ve provided, experts agree.
Enabling employees to provide feedback about customer experiences engages and empowers them, and taking the information they provide and using it to drive change is an incredibly powerful way of proving that they matter, that the company is willing to listen to and support them to help them to perform their jobs better, according to Del Moro.
In the end, “you can’t look at [VoC and VoE] as separate experiences. The customer experience and the employee experience are inseparable,” Maughan says. “This is fundamental table stakes for companies.” 
News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.