Despite the evolution of contact center technology (think conversational AI), the spread of digital channels (think smart speakers), and the dramatic change in the ways companies interact with customers (think mobile-first), the industry KPIs for measuring the impact of these transformations remain limited. CSAT, NPS, and more recently, Customer Effort Scores (CES) measure different elements of CX: the last interaction, customer loyalty, or journey pain points. However, even in combination, they do not answer two fundamental questions: what are the drivers for this performance and what is their direct effect on business targets?

As companies embark on large-scale digital transformation, increasingly focusing on CX innovation, their need to understand the customer and predict business outcomes becomes the key. In this blog, I look at Concentrix’s ‘Voice of the Customer’ practice and how the company correlates VOC analytics to hard business KPIs and evaluates against future customer behavior.

VOC as an integrated approach

Concentrix acquired its VOC practice through its Convergys acquisition. The VOC practice started in the 1980s and currently has ~280 resources in eight countries supporting ~40 clients in ~90 languages and eight voice and digital survey channels. The VOC offerings include:

• Program design services, with experts to guide the VOC design of surveys, questions, sampling, reporting, and where and how to apply them in the customer journey
• Program success services, with specialists to handle day-to-day program management
• People & culture strategies, with resources to design practices to engage employees in VOC
• Continuous improvement consulting dedicated to realigning processes, policies, and channels to customer needs based on a range of analyses such as issue and impact analysis, root cause and action planning analysis.

Concentrix also has a proprietary VOC platform, ConcentrixCX, which collects and shares customer feedback and manages sample and quotas after interactions in the contact centers, over digital properties, in physical stores, and during field services. Customer feedback is collected via surveys over the phone, outbound calls with live interviewers, outbound IVR, SMS, mobile apps, as well as the traditional pop-up web surveys and emails.

It has a real-time engine for text analytics performing word and sentiment analysis on unstructured data, for example, open-ended comments. It then color-codes and visualizes with an icon the comment emotion for agent-level users and theme emotions for leadership. The NLU elements of the text analytics generate the categories and themes emerging from the text, with Concentrix analysts building the industry-specific taxonomy and dictionaries. 

Its reporting layer includes functionality such as dashboards, reports, and analytics tools with role-based workflows. The reports are customized for the different user levels with different slices of data and tools available for senior management, operational roles, and customer-facing staff. ConcentrixCX has a desktop and mobile version, deployed on a cloud.

The provider offers the platform in BPaaS modular format and has clients on both services and software (most clients) and services only, where it runs the program on the client legacy VOC tool. The clients are a mix of non-BPO and BPO clients. In some of these instances, Concentrix manages the VOC program for the multivendor network. In addition, to target the VOC market, Concentrix has a separate salesforce with its own statements of work and P&Ls.

Challenges in implementing VOC

In the pure SaaS VOC deployments, clients’ small teams often struggle to implement the customer feedback programs at scale with an outcome focused on transforming CX. Instead, they turn into administrative groups to deploy and run the software. Once companies purchase the licenses and roll out the tool, the generated CSAT and NPS numbers remain in isolation unless the organization procures consulting services to advise on an enterprise-wide plan to increase these satisfaction numbers.

Another challenge is that VOC programs are the remits of CX departments which are still on a maturity curve, usually with a limited mandate. Uplift of NPS requires the transformation of various functions in an organization, from marketing and sales to supply chain and IT. As a result, even if the research or customer service group measures feedback accurately and links it to a root cause, they cannot translate the insights into CX strategic actions.

Unified CX measurement framework

Concentrix identified these challenges, particularly in industries with complex feedback measurement environments such as banking, financial services, and healthcare, and proposes a unified approach which focuses on driving organizational changes and outcomes. For example:

• The reporting layer of ConcentrixCX has alerts and a case management suite triggering notifications from unstructured text such as words associated with complaints. It also has a one-on-one coaching module for frontline employees with guided performance management flows, individualized scorecards with actual customer responses and links to recordings, and built-in rewards and recognitions
• ConcentrixCX includes a process improvement tool to extract ideas from employees and push them through a process improvement pipeline. For example, a U.S. healthcare company in 2017, used this feature to identify a 24-hour update discrepancy between its online provider network information and the information available to the agents. The agents escalated suggestions to the digital team via ConcentrixCX and closing the disconnect delivered ~7% decrease in call volumes.

An example implementation of the end-to-end VOC approach is for a U.S. regional bank, where Concentrix ran 17 survey programs across channels with ~400k surveys completed since 2018. For this bank, ConcentrixCX has ~10k enterprise platform users, and over the program, the company made and implemented ~71 recommendations resulting in a 10-point NPS improvement in 2018, projected to drive $20m annual revenue gain.

Next for Concentrix VOC

Concentrix is looking at supplementing traditional modes of surveys measuring transactions to conversational micro-journey opportunities where it gathers feedback more naturally. For example, it is investing in API-based technology which will allow integrating survey questions into various devices such as websites, mobile applications, and connected cars. The advantages in asking questions inside the experience are masking the survey part so it ‘does not feel like a survey’ to the customer and thus increases response rates. These more targeted feedback collections also create a more precise picture of the relevance to the specific stage of the customer journey and identify pain points.

Further, the company plans to expand the attitudinal survey inputs with new unstructured data sources such as speech analytics, chat transcripts, and employee notes into the centralized view of ConcentrixCX and move towards a predictive and prescriptive state.