Generative AI and Enterprise Intelligence: The Next Horizon for VOC

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been evolving rapidly, and one of its most promising applications is generative AI. This technology is poised to transform the way enterprises capture and understand customer intelligence—and it’s about time. For too many years, voice of the customer (VOC) programs have been stuck in neutral and failed to live up to their potential. Executives complain about lack of speed-to-insight, actionability of the data, and tangible evidence that demonstrates the financial return on investment (ROI) of listening to customers. These frustrations are very real and there’s good reason for them. Here are a few examples: 

• Small CX teams: At most brands, CX teams average only 8-10 people—and VOC specialists are only a portion of those teams. These small teams have a lot of responsibility, from survey development and administration to data analytics to dashboard creation, reporting, and beyond. With so much responsibility, these teams end up making trade-offs about where to spend their time. Too often, CX teams get stuck in the day-to-day grind of administrative functions and data analytics. When this happens, they spend less time on higher value transformational activities including customer insight creation, action planning, and cross-functional alignment. 
  

• Limited purview: Don’t get us wrong, when it comes to VOC solutions, we love surveys. They are powerful, insightful tools that can tell you exactly how your customers feel and why. But surveys alone can limit insight. The success of VOC programs becomes limited because they have often failed to broaden their “insight sources.” And we’re not just talking about social reviews and interaction transcripts. Metadata, such as product usage, demographics, and customer spend are powerful inputs that must be collected and aligned to feedback to capitalize on the VOC program’s potential. Yet, CX teams struggle to harness the power of this data because they don’t have the time, resources, or even the expertise.
  

• Lack of buy-in: The most frequent complaint of VOC leaders last year was lack of organizational buy-in. It’s not surprising. Real-time NPS dashboards and build-it-yourself charts have become all the rage. Yet, internal stakeholders are losing interest in customer intelligence. Why? Numbers tell them very little. There’s no context around the results. Nobody knows what to do next. 
  

Enter Generative AI and Enterprise Intelligence  

The power of generative AI has the potential to transform VOC programs by eradicating the barriers that have blocked success for so long. Imagine a world where CX teams aren’t spending all their time designing surveys and analyzing data, but instead facilitating organizational changes that improve the lives of customers and employees. Imagine a world where stakeholders across the enterprise receive a weekly personalized briefing of the CX issues they should care about (bye, bye static dashboards!). Imagine understanding where your customer pain points are and what to do about them in a matter of seconds, not months. This is the future of VOC—this is enterprise intelligence.  

Enterprise intelligence will allow organizations to understand what their customers think, say, feel, and do—harnessing the power of all human experience data—including survey feedback, contact center interactions, social media, online reviews, and more. The power of that data will be unleashed with generative AI to deliver personalized intelligence and drive automated actions that makes customers happier, accelerates market share, empowers product teams, simplifies processes, and makes employees more productive.  

For example, let’s say the head of sales wants to know what are the main causes of customer churn. An enterprise intelligence solution would organize all of the human experience data across sources and, using a generative AI interface, the head of sales could enter a simple query such as, “What are the top three reasons for customer churn in the past three months?” Within seconds, they will get a response with data culled from across the enterprise—instant information collated by generative AI from across the organization. What’s more, enterprise intelligence provides the ability to make recommendations based on that data so that the head of sales knows where to focus their efforts to address and resolve the issues driving churn. They get instant access to information, insights, and actions. 

We’re excited about the future of VOC, and we can’t wait to lead you there. Watch our recent webinar with Execs In The Know on the power of enterprise intelligence and generative AI to learn more.