Gartner Urges Supplementing Surveys with Analytics

By 2025, 60 percent of organizations with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) programs will supplement traditional surveys by analyzing voice and text interactions with customers, research firm Gartner predicts.

Business and CX leaders will look to decrease their reliance on traditional surveys, while VoC programs will still face constant pressure to demonstrate value through improved business outcomes, the research firm also predicts.

“While VoC platform providers have been investing in improved interaction analytics for years, clients will still demand more than just great natural language processing [NLP],” says Augie Ray, vice president analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice. “Already, too much customer insight remains locked in databases, and increasing that amount of unused knowledge will not help. VoC providers must continue to improve their capabilities for how data and insights can be conveyed in usable ways across client organizations.”

Most customer service organizations today are still using traditional customer surveys, which are perceived to bring less value than other methods of VoC collection. To remedy this disconnect, Gartner suggests that complex NLP can derive customer context, emotion, and experiences from email, messages, posts, and calls with the company. Not only can speech and text analytics tools with NLP provide insight with post-transaction analysis, but they can also provide real-time insight that can be used in the moment to impact CX.

“Those responsible for VoC programs must consider the implications of disseminating this new insight to different business partners in different ways that are relevant to their jobs,” suggests Deb Alvord, senior director analyst in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Turning voice and text into data is just part of the challenge. Converting that into relevant and actionable knowledge demands careful considerations of the reports, dashboards, alerts, and other communication methods.”

With VoC and analytics technology anticipated to have the greatest future growth in development and value, Gartner says business and CX leaders should keep the following in mind when exploring/expanding these types of projects:

• Use existing foundations.Implement speech and text analytics already built into many VoC or interaction recording tools, buying new analytics tools or hiring staff to tune and analyze existing tools to improve understanding of the CX.
• Prioritize active channels.Inventory current and potential listening posts along the customer journey and prioritize them based on the completeness of the narratives, the ability to confirm authentic customers, and the value they bring to the overall CX strategy.
• Explore distribution options. Develop strategies for how this burgeoning source of customer insight will be distributed to employees and internal stakeholders so it’s relevant, intuitive, actionable, applicable, and embedded into their daily jobs. Keeping this additional insight locked in databases and hubs won’t improve the value of VoC to the organization.