What is Voice Feedback and How can You Generate Customer Insights From it?

”Calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes”.

This is a common pre-recorded message that I think we have all heard once or twice when calling a customer service department.

Some firms receive over 10 000 hours of calls per day and it would take several years for one person to listen to and transcribe those calls. Having a person listening to every call and transcribing them isn’t really an effective strategy. So how do you make the most out of your voice feedback?

With the modern technologies available today, such as speech-to-text and artificial intelligence (AI) it’s possible to automatically generate insights from calls, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) surveys, and post-call surveys.

In this article, we’ll explain what voice feedback is and how you can easily generate customer insights from your customer calls.

What is voice feedback?

Organizations often collect customer feedback from multiple sources such as social media, emails, chat, surveys or reviews. Usually when we refer to customer feedback, we think about feedback that someone has written down, e.g. answers to a survey. But feedback isn’t always given in a written format – you can also receive voice feedback from your calls with customers.

As mentioned earlier, some organizations receive huge volumes of calls every day. Although more modern ways of contacting support agents are available, such as chat and chatbots, calling is one of the most popular service channels, and is still widely used by customers.

Aircall.io tells us that the phone remains the most used (48%) and preferred (80%) method for reaching support agents. The benefits of reaching out to support agents via phone are that it’s immediate, direct and it gives customers the chance to ask and quickly get answers to any follow-up questions that they may have.

So the recent focus on having non-voice channels in place to help customers solve their problems doesn’t necessarily mean “the death” of regular phone calls, as for a lot of companies the ancient phone is still going strong.

As a consequence, many companies receive large volumes of customer data via phone calls. The data that they receive in these calls is generally just saved and never mined for customer insights, despite often containing a wealth of extremely valuable information.

The relationship between customer calls and customer loyalty

The customer experience is naturally affected by the performance of the customer service agents, although the customer experience is made up of all the interactions that the customer has with your brand, and not just from one specific interaction.

However, you can argue that some interactions have a bigger impact on the overall customer experience than others. If you as a customer compare a physical interaction with a service agent from a particular company, with seeing a billboard on the highway branded with that company’s name. Most likely it’s the interaction with the service agent that will leave the biggest mark, and consequently have a bigger impact on your experience as a customer.

Customer service staff have the important job of molding the relationship with customers and this plays a huge part in retaining customers and and generating loyalty. Loyal customers are the best customers as they will always come back to purchase and use your services. They are also the ones that promote your business to friends and colleagues through word-of-mouth.

95.7% of call center professionals believe that customer satisfaction is the most important metric to follow. This stresses the importance of being able to deliver a great customer experience to your customers. Organizations have to make sure to continuously improve their customer experience to keep their customers satisfied.

Making business decisions with voice feedback

So to sum it all up – organizations really shouldn’t ignore voice data as a source of customer insights, as compared to text feedback voice data often contains extremely detailed and useful feedback. This is because it requires less cognitive effort to tell someone your opinion than it does to write it down.

 How do you generate customer insights from voice data?

Voice-to-text technology is a technology that has risen to everyone’s lips lately. The most well-known examples are voice assistants like Alexa and Siri which are becoming more and more popular in households today. Voice-to-text has been found to be useful in a wide range of environments, such as in education and business.

In a business setting, it can be employed to transcribe calls automatically, reducing the need to have a person or a team doing this manually. If you receive several hours of calls every day, it could take a person several years (!) to manually transcribe, but with speech to text technology, this can take less than a minute.

By adopting this technology organizations can save money and allocate resources more efficiently. You can ensure that your employees focus on important tasks that actually require human intelligence – the type of work that they are better at and generally enjoy more.

When you want to generate insights from voice data the first thing you need to do is to transcribe the audio into text. This can be done using voice-to-text analytics, also known as speech-to-text analytics. This technology simply turns spoken words into written words. When the audio is transcribed you can treat the transcribed text as normal text feedback. The next step is to analyze using a text analysis software that provides actionable insights that will help you make business decisions.

Lumoa can do all of this for you, from transcribing voice data to analyzing the transcribed text. Lumoa’s intelligent CX platform uses AI, machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and makes it easy to generate customer insights from voice feedback. Feedback can be analyzed in over 60 different languages, meaning that it is possible for organizations to generate customer insights from every market that you operate in.