When the "Voice of the Customer" is Actually the Voice of the Customer

As usual, I underscore the irony with compliance: Nobody does it until they have to. "Right. They face hundreds of thousands to million-dollar fines when they go off-script, so knowing when they're doing that, or being able to reverse the ill effects immediately... let's just say they look at their lack of fines as a real reason to get these solutions in place," relates Tom.

Is compliance a proactive, or a reactive, action? Tom has an analogy that doesn't apply to my family, because we never did this. But, he says, "It's no different than managing the allowance for my kids. If I knock them a dime for not making their beds, they will probably not make their beds. If I knock it by the total $25 dollars (that's the part I never did!) they will make their beds, I guarantee!"

So I ask him whether companies are willing to take the risk, and avoid the cost of compliance and hope it doesn't happen? "I see both," admits Tom. "It goes back to my analogy about my kids' allowance. There are certain industries that consider that the fine is less than the cost to avoid it. In some industries, it's considered cheaper to pay the fine and continue to produce maximum output." And to underscore the voice aspect, Tom points out that the cost to prove the phone call never happened is much less than the litigation.

So I had to drill down on this voice/litigation thing. I am somewhat familiar with the way litigations work, and that emails, documents, text messages are fair game, but I wasn't sure to what extent voice messages were discoverable, as they say. "Absolutely," says Tom. "It's becoming a big part. Phonetic litigation is becoming a huge field."

Phonetic litigation. Besides being an excellent rock band name, it's the first time it has crossed my radar, to be honest. Are companies really hip to voice capture and analytics? Tom is honest. "It depends on the industry. I would agree that a retail organization is probably not hip to it yet, but high-compliance industries such as insurance are very aware of it. In fact, there are voice standards that guide the insurance industry."

This has taken me into a new realm. I never thought of voice as a "big data" component, but I am starting to get the picture. "We look at big data as so much different and so much more than your average big data zealots." I can't argue with that.

I'm still trying to get my mind around what this segment should be considered, so I ask whether Tom considers himself in the business intelligence (BI) market, or is he creating a new marketspace?

"No, we're in the BI world," he says, "but in a consumer- and sales-focused world, too. We're bringing all the rich data that a company has to help them service customers better, and sell more and sell more efficiently. An example would be a company that has high-volume sales, and is looking to understand why customers call up to leave their relationship. So they want to use the voice data to mine ‘wins and losses,'" he says. It's one thing to simply put it into Salesforce as a win or loss, but by Tom's way of thinking, "it's better to analyze those calls and understand the motivations: ‘Hey, there's a better product, and I can get it cheaper in the store down the street.' So the idea is to react to those conversations, create new scripts, and create new proactive marketing campaigns that will avoid having those people go away."

Another example? "A for-profit university gets calls from students who want to leave the school. They leave clues in those calls. They are now able to focus in on keywords, such as, ‘I don't like my roommate.' So we're finding those calls, and having counselors reach out and proactively contact those students to move them or talk to them about coping techniques. That's ?pretty cool."

But is it really happening? "We're on the bleeding edge, for sure. It's been a long time coming. There have been a few missteps because the technology wasn't ready. But it's ready for prime time now; it's just a matter of people buying into the goodness of it," admits Tom.

So how do you get people to understand "the goodness of it?" "I've spent the last 24 months on the road talking to people like you and talking to customers and selling to potential customers. And before that, when the technology wasn't even ready yet... I believed it had that much to offer."

Mining For Gold

Big data is, obviously, in the news a lot lately. There was just today an article in the Harvard Business Review talking about the dangers of using big data analytics to discriminate among race, gender and even sexual identity! It's getting kind of out-of-hand.

I don't think Tom sees it that way. He wants to get the voice of the customer to be clearer, and the value to the customer more precise. "I deeply believe there is a ton of gold sitting there. I also believe most companies are missing one of the channels. That's my version of evangelism for big data analytics," Tom says, with some pride.

"It is in a hype cycle, but it's a good hype cycle. The technology is ready for prime time. But most people are missing a key component, and that's voice. There aren't enough people who understand that voice is actually accessible as easily as a spreadsheet."

I was in the telecom business in the ‘80s. I knew what the market cared about. It was all about traffic, and Erlang charts and routing algorithms and connectivity speed. But nobody in that era would have dreamed that capturing the voice would be part of the equation.

"Absolutely true. But with the capture of voice, we're getting smarter."