The voice of the customer (VoC) market looks much different today than it did five years ago.
Advances in natural language processing, system integrations, and data visualizations are just some of the tech trends that have pushed it forward.
Indeed, it is now a much more sophisticated space, with Gartner predicting that 60 percent of organizations will supplement customer surveys with conversational analytics by 2025.
Many leading tech providers are driving such developments. These include Verint, Qualtrics, and Reputation, vendors that all participated in this month’s roundtable.
In doing so, they put forward the following expert spokespeople:
- Aditi Mehta, Product Marketing Director, Experience Management, at Verint
- Ellen Loeshelle, Director of Product Management at Qualtrics
- Chris Sparling, Senior Sales and CX Director at Reputation
Read on to capture their insight into how the space will continue to evolve and their business’s plans to stay at the forefront of the market.
How Will Generative AI Disrupt the VoC Market?
Mehta: Generative AI takes open feedback, captures insight immediately, and injects creativity into VoC.
That immediacy is critical. After all, organizations are often successful in collecting massive amounts of customer feedback, yet many struggle to uncover insights and respond to them in real-time.
Thankfully, generative AI unleashes the possibility of responding to customer feedback in a more targeted and personalized way.
Such a prospect is exciting, as it will allow businesses to close the customer feedback loop – which many often find an overwhelming task.
Loeshelle: Generative AI will allow organizations to better understand and support customers at all phases of their customer journey.
Consider service touchpoints. There, AI already allows agents to create deeper human interactions by capturing VoC data, extracting insights, and funneling those through to the CRM.
Moreover, AI analyzes those contact center conversations to unpack further insight. Indeed, many models can easily identify patterns in customer behavior, sentiment, and emerging trends.
The understanding customers receive will only improve with generative AI, helping organizations to make critical data-driven decisions at a pace unlike ever before.
Sparling: As Google and Bing use generative AI to change search, businesses must start managing publicly available data relating to customer sentiment. That includes data from online reviews, business listings, and more.
After all, private data will have little impact on how customers perceive the business through platforms like ChatGPT and Google's SGE search. As such, it is more important than ever that a company is aware of its publicly referenceable reputation.
Using these tools to see how the business currently fares is an excellent first step, as organizations may gain insight into the information potential customers will be receiving.
From there, that company can filter these insights into a VoC program to influence how generative AI platforms perceive them.
Which Other Trends Will Continue to Shake Up the VoC Space?
Mehta: The art and science of VoC involves combining various data points to develop master profiles of customers, which allow businesses to serve them better.
More businesses are leaning into customer experience automation to improve how they leverage these profiles and advance customer experiences.
Such automation streamlines workflows for resolving customer complaints and issues swiftly. Meanwhile, it also helps with spreading VoC insights across the enterprise.
Data analytics will also play an increasing role in unearthing these insights, surfacing trends in real-time, and enabling a predictive approach to prevent issues or mitigate the after-effects.
Loeshelle: Making businesses more human is a growing trend across the VoC space.
Indeed, organizations are increasingly adopting natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to better understand feedback and achieve this aim.