Mastering your customers' expectations is the key to driving sales and extending the customer lifecycle.

According to Gartner, 76% of customers expect organizations to meet their expectations, and they are more than willing to spend 17% more if the experience is a memorable one.

Capturing the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is essential to outline the needs and wants of your customers. This research method is used to collect and analyze customer feedback to understand their preferences, expectations and opinions about the brand and its products/services. From this perspective, useful information can be derived to enhance the customer experience, which represents one of the main objectives of VoC programs.

Until recently, the acquisition of a large amount of data and the related analysis of the various interactions required a significant investment of time and resources, with significant operating costs. Today, thanks to Speech & Text Analytics solutions, that combine a phonetic engine for the analysis of telephone conversations with a technology for the analysis of written interactions (web, chat, social, e-mail), it is possible to capture every single word of an interaction on heterogeneous channels, in such a way as to perform a complete analysis of the interaction.

Being able to understand all the shades of what the customer has declared requires the content expressed in natural language to be effectively processed, managed, and organized before being analyzed. For this reason, analyzing the voice of the customer involves the use of text analytics technologies that allow feedback to be automatically categorized and the most relevant topics to stand out, through the interpretation of sentiment and opinions expressed.

The use of automated Text & Speech Analytics technologies has several benefits including:

• Optimizing the customer experience: Speech Analytics can analyze all data related to the customer, from the reason behind the interaction to the "sentiment" of the customer's voice. This allows you to quickly identify customer’s needs, wants and expectations, and thus being able to respond to changing demands in the marketplace.
• Improving the quality of the service provided by the company: since the interaction between the customer and the agent is monitored in real time, the Team Leaders can effectively support the agent both in respecting the scripts and the various procedures, and in improving their performance in solving the requests at the first attempt. In this way, it is possible to immediately identify the main reasons for customer dissatisfaction and reduce volumes, thereby increasing service quality.
• Minimizing operating expenses and optimize costs: the ROI resulting from the implementation of a Speech Analytics solution is immediate; the collected and analyzed information allows you to detect problems that can be solved in a self-service mode, thus saving resources to be used in customer care activities; the acknowledgement of all the reasons for dissatisfaction allow a reduction in the churn rate; moreover, the timely detection of insights and trends will give the company a real competitive advantage.
• Identifying new up-selling and cross-selling opportunities: sales can benefit from Speech Analytics to identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Similarly, Speech Analytics can be leveraged by the marketing department to monitor lead generation and campaign effectiveness.
• Retaining the customer base: Speech Analytics guarantees a decrease in customer churn rates. This is due to the high quality of service and CX that become a competitive asset for the company.

Speech & Text Analytics technologies have become a central asset to personalize the interaction with the customer who plays a central role in all business departments. By listening to the Voice of the Customer and implementing a "customer-centric" approach, the company achieves high retention, increased customer satisfaction and positive brand reputation.