Verint Engage 2019 Conference – Key Learnings for Voice of Customer Teams

Intro

A sun-filled week at the Verint Engage 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida left me buzzing with new insights and ideas to enhance our Voice of Customer program, and provide new cost-efficient opportunities for organizations to drive improved customer experiences based on feedback and sentiment.

Here are my five top learnings from the conference, and how I think they can help digital organizations facing ever-increasing customer expectations, and nimble competitors aggressively enhancing their digital experience to grow (steal) market share.

What do most failed chatbot programs have in common?

Very few virtual assist (chatbot) programs fail during implementation or for technical reasons. Whether thru a vendor, a commercial platform such as Azure/LUIS, a completely open-source solution, or some combination of all three, the options to build chatbots are robust and stable. It is “easy” to stand up a chatbot “minimum viable product,” and no less capital efficient than any other front-end development project of similar scope and size, to deploy a full-featured chatbot to serve your customer base.

The failures do not occur during implementation, when they happen, they come during the maintenance / ongoing operations phase of the products life-cycle.

The common category error that dooms failed chatbot programs is to view them as a single fixed-cost digital asset, a “tool,” that you build once, and then utilize on a relatively fixed schedule of depreciation, until it needs to be replaced.

This is a common mindset for call-center and agent-assist software, since the (human) agent still sits at the heart of the interaction, ensuring the ongoing success and adaptation of the system to customer’s ever-changing needs.

With a virtual assist program, the critical piece that is too often left out of the equation is to design and fund an ongoing “education” plan for your chatbot. How will it adapt to customer’s changing needs? To their evolving language? To you own brand’s evolution? If you do not provide the resources to train your chatbot, it will depreciate much faster than you are probably assuming, and not only fail to improve customer experience, it will in most cases become an active detractor, as its stale information and limited language-processing capabilities fall farther and farther behind customer expectations.

Is customer experience ever going to start improving again?

The Forrester Group shared some surprising (shocking?) results from their Customer Experience Index survey, an annual benchmark of customer experiences. Not a single brand received their top mark of ‘Excellent’ in either 2017 or 2018, strong evidence that in the US market, customer experience has reached a plateau.

The downside is that the “same old” best practices and tactics are not generating the returns they did in the decades before 2016. Arguably digital maturity and a US customer that is getting more and more digitally savvy is driving some of this plateau effect.

The upside is that a focus on touchpoints that comfort and delight, break through the noise, or truly surpass customer expectations, will be that much more memorable. Forrester advised organizations to consider a focused approach that targets major improvements to specific touchpoints in the customer journey with the best potential to enhance CX, versus a strategy designed to spread smaller, more incremental improvements across all touchpoints.

Most large organizations are wasting a huge opportunity to accelerate CX improvement…

…their own employees! Few large organizations have an actionable ‘Voice of Employee’ program in place, but in many cases, almost all of the tools are already in place. Even simple mechanisms, like surveys or polls sent via email, can quickly and cost-efficiently generate actionable feedback about your customer experience. Especialy when your employees are also frequent customers themselves!

Employees can bring a nuanced and more objective mindset to bear on a customer touchpoint, and when that touchpoint has active and ongoing invovlment from support or operational staff, they can identify gaps in their toolkits or capabilities that are often hidden to the customer, and thus often inisible or missed when relying solely on ‘Voice of Customer’ feedback.

One of the best investments available today for CX analysis

As your VOC team proves out the ROI of customer feedback and enhanced customer experience, the odds are good you will find the touchpoints and products requesting your services growing faster than your headcount and/or the hours in the week available to you to provide effective client services.

One of the best tools developed for VOC programs in the past decade are anomaly detection systems. Customers implementing anomaly detection for the CX research and analysis teams have found 2-3X increases in analyst productivity. By automating the comparison of your structured data (think, sentiment scores like Task Accomplishment Rate, NPS or Customer Satisfaction) against its historically normal ranges, you can expand the number of surveys your team manages.

This can open up new approaches to your VOC program, such as moving from a small number (1-5) of large “omnibus” surveys designed to cover every possible aspect of your customer experience (thinly), to a large number of small, hyper-targeted surveys, that are each much shorter, but still get richer detail and better feedback on the product or feature they are paired with, due to their specific focus.

Grow your VOC program’s social capital to increase investment

How do you sell and grow VOC within your organization? Get social! Use the data you collect to “tell the story” of VOC on a quarterly or monthly cadence. Track or tally the changes in your major product releases, and link them to your relevant customer feedback. When a product enhancement moves the needle for a business KPI (for example, increased average order size), and you’ve connected that enhancement to customer feedback, presto! Now you’ve got a great story linking voice of customer feedback to demonstrated ROI for your organization.

Take this process to the next level with an infographic, or visualizations when the “data story” can be plotted and graphed. Get the highlights and strongest proof points in front of your CTO at least once a year.

Conclusion

I hope you can take away something you learend here to improve or catalyze a VOC program where you work. I was shocked to hear Customer Experience has been essentially stagnant at the enterprise level for the past two years. In this environment it’s more important than ever to identify where your feedback can be leveraged to deliver meaningful improvements for the customer, and then make sure leadership at every level in your organization can see how the VOC program improved your business KPIs.