Listening to the Voice of your Customers

It’s time for every business to prioritize their customer voice.

It’s time to make sure you've got an accurate representation of what your customer voice actually is. That's been one of the major challenges for businesses in the past; there's never been effective mechanisms for harnessing the customer's collective voice. A business needs to be able to listen to the entirety of their client base. And so from that perspective, the first step is really making sure you've got a representative sample.

The challenge with that is you can get a disproportionate or a non-representative view of what your customers are saying or thinking through tools like surveys, where you only have a small sample of customers that you're actually listening to. Often, if you have a closed question, if you're asking a yes or no question when the answer may be more complex, people will typically give you the answers they think you want to hear. And that's where the nuance exists. That's where it's important to have tools that are wider and more intuitive than just a simple survey.

You have to make sure the right people are listening to the customers. Oftentimes, customer voice is only really listened to in the cloud or marketing groups, but not in the other aspects of a company. All of the business needs to understand the customer voice, not just one or two departments.

The final element of capturing and understanding that customer voice is really understanding what your target customers are thinking, segmenting them according to their importance to your core business, and listening for the signals that are going to dictate how you respond and relate.

This is why I believe that augmented intelligence using artificial intelligence is the way to understand the customer voice

Voice interactions are by nature unstructured, with people talking in different ways and languages in interactions that are very complex. And from that perspective, traditional software has a number of limitations. So much of your customer interactions are not captured using traditional tools. You need to be very prescriptive around a sequence of logic, which basically follows the lines of If This Then That - which doesn't always work in language, because people can be interrupted, or they can lose your train of thought, or they can use different words that mean different things.

It's a very complex data problem. Machine learning and pattern matching, which is at the heart of how AI works, are exactly the right tool for the problem. This is a whole new data source that's never really been fully understood. It's opening up a whole new frontier. There's a huge opportunity for companies to explore their voice data in a much more sophisticated way than it's ever been done before.

There’s an old adage which says, it's not what you say, it's how you say it that matters. That's something that I firmly believe. My original training was in psychology, where I began to understand that human emotion and feelings are driven by our perception of how things are said as much as what is said.

What we're doing with this technology is not just looking at words, we're looking at the words in the context of the interactions and the interaction dynamics, the reaction of a customer through an agent, and how the actions and emotive responses an agent gives are as important as what the agent says.

Humans are very complex, and we are emotional beings as much as logical beings; but too many companies think about data in a very structured way. Whereas actually, how people react is often driven primarily from an emotive sense, rather than a logical sense.

So I think there's a huge amount of intelligence that can be gathered from that. It matters because when people are interacting with companies, they're interacting with brands, and a brand in itself is a persona. You have to be able to capture the persona of your brand in the way that you speak, and the way that you interact with your customers.

Those moments of truth are what defines the brand.

That's when you get real customer advocacy.