A Voice of Customer program gives customers the opportunity to give subjective feedback and artificial intelligence analyzes the feedback to reveal patterns and trends in customers‘ thoughts and feelings.
Voice of Customer programs are usually structured in a similar way: an online survey with a few questions to be answered on a scale (e.g. 1-5) plus an open text field where a customer can enter wishes, feedback or suggestions for improvement. Since there are no limits on the number of survey respondents per day, there is a whole lot of data that is generated – which creates so-called big data. It is neither possible nor advisable to evaluate this amount of data manually, which is why artificial intelligence (AI) is used here.
Artificial intelligence not only plays a role in the analysis of customer comments in text fields, but also when a customer fills out the online survey. For example, artificial intelligence suggests words as soon as a customer starts typing in the text field - this makes input faster and more user-friendly for the customer resulting in them providing more valuable commentary.
Dashboards clearly display the deep data analysis
In real-time, the Digital Prediction AI Machine at ISC-CX ingests countless customer comments and analyzes them according to different aspects depending upon the VOC program’s goals: Is a comment positive or negative? What topic is it all about? Usually, categories such as product quality, store cleanliness or the behavior of the employees are specified beforehand, but the system also finds new keywords in the commentary that occur frequently and creates categories from them that the retailer may not have thought of previously. All of this analysis then flows into a dashboard, where the respective store manager and any relevant corporate office managers can see how customers are feeling about their experiences.
Moreover, AI is even able to filter out and capture trends from the customers‘ comments. As Robert Hauser, ISC-CX’s Head of Product Development for Voice-2025 explains: "Our Digital Prediction AI goes one step beyond expanding feedback categories. It identifies, for example, specific words and phrases customers use to describe their thoughts and feelings about a product, store environment or customer service experience. As a result, marketing campaigns/collateral or feedback surveys can be adapted to incorporate these words or phrases to be more engaging and effective." The AI thus sees what you would otherwise miss.
Continuous improvement of the scores
The goal of a Voice of Customer program is to improve products and operational processes through collecting and analyzing subjective customer opinions. It is not important to achieve a certain absolute score, but to continuously improve scores through taking targeted measures based on the customer feedback analyses. "Composite survey scores for stores within the same company can be very different and are sometimes influenced by a culture or region," explains Hauser. "That's why it's important to look at the data for each individual store and make local improvements - even in areas identified by AI that you didn’t realize customers consider important! "
