Consulta Uses Voice of the Customer Survey Insights to Help Clients Optimize the Customer Experience

Provides trusted, real-time insights to support informed decision-making and business transformation.
Captures feedback from customers and employees efficiently and proactively across multiple channels.
Helps create new survey revenue streams.

Opportunity

Consulta is a leading customer experience (CX) consulting and market research organization. The company employs 80 staff and is headquartered in Pretoria, South Africa.

Consulta are sense-makers: a company driven to help clients make sense of their customers. Consulta believes that business strategy begins with the customer rather than starting with great technology and attempting to build a customer base around it. CX matters more than ever too. Consulta cites Gartner research that shows 89 percent of companies now differentiate themselves mostly based on CX. However, Consulta also reveals that just 28 percent of CX professionals feel their programs are successful at driving business outcomes.1

The challenge for Consulta is how to understand the historical, current, and future state of CX among its clients. It needed a flexible and scalable research platform to capture the voice of the customer across all channels, enabling it to connect the dots to understand its clients’ and their customers’ overall experience.

“To understand our clients’ business, we need to listen to the client, their customers, and their employees across multiple channels,” says Ruan van Niekerk, senior systems engineer at Consulta. “Using this approach, our specialists can unlock exciting new business and customer insights that can help improve business performance.”

Solution

In response, Consulta standardized on Verint Survey Management to collect, analyze, and act on multi-channel customer feedback. This modern CX solution enables the organization to capture customer input across web, phone, SMS, and email channels while providing omnichannel analysis and reporting.

“We began using the Verint enterprise survey platform for online surveys,” says van Niekerk. “Clients would provide us with a list of customers to contact and we’d reach out to them. We’ve since extended this to the call center to create instant, real-time feedback on CX.”

Take the example of a financial services organization who partners with Consulta to proactively engage with its customers and use the customer data and insights to drive change, explains van Niekerk. “We may be contracted to survey a segment of life insurance customers for the financial services client, identifying how satisfied they are with the service experience, how well their enquiry was dealt with, and other topics. Using benchmark analysis, we can identify where satisfaction rose considerably in a particular period, and which areas the client needs to focus on improving.”

Using Verint Survey Management, van Niekerk and his team can quickly create an email- or call-center based research survey questionnaire. This can be accomplished using predefined templates, by building their own survey, or through direct collaboration with the financial services customer.

Verint also helps Consulta optimize the targeted capture of customer data. Van Niekerk’s team can manage the frequency and timing of each survey, for instance, to help eliminate “feedback fatigue” and improve response rates. Mobile-friendly survey formats also help increase survey participation.

Having captured the raw feedback data, the team can quickly turn it into actionable intelligence, using dashboards and other reporting formats for presentation to the client.

Consulta is currently conducting more than one million email-based surveys every month. Some clients wish to maintain the live agent interview via the call center, with Consulta undertaking up to 8,000 surveys every day.

“Verint [Survey Management] is a powerful means of collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback across all channels. This real-time customer feedback provides our clients with credible, trustworthy, and actionable insights into their products, organizations, and customers.”
Ruan van Niekerk Senior Systems Engineer, Consulta

Benefits

“Verint [Survey Management] is helping to build a prosperous future for Consulta,” says van Niekerk. “The enterprise survey platform is incredibly easy to integrate, the user experience is first-class, and it’s packed with useful features to deliver fast, reliable multichannel surveys.”

The key value of Verint Survey Management is the way it helps Consulta collect, process, and take action on customer feedback. For example, the platform is a cornerstone of the Consulta Mystery Shopping, which allows the company to measure the effectiveness of training programs, customer-centricity initiatives, or evaluating whether nor not employees are treating customers fairly and equally. The Mystery Shopping solution is in the form of a mobile app that makes use of smart technology devices. Customer feedback can be tracked in real-time with the ability to interact directly with shoppers through the app.

The Verint technology is also helping Consulta build new revenue streams. Consulta relies on the Verint platform to support the SA-csi (South African Customer Satisfaction Index), an independent national benchmark of customer satisfaction across products and services used by South African consumers. The index uses data collected through customer interviews—all powered by Verint—and feeds this into a statistically sound model developed for the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

The result is actionable insights which can lead to real transformation across client organizations; focused intelligence on areas where clients need to invest CX resources; and trusted data insights to support informed decision-making. “The SA-csi has been highly successful, so you could argue that Verint is indirectly helping Consulta to enter new market areas and grow revenues,” says van Niekerk.

Featured Verint Solutions

Survey Management
Your customers and employees have vital opinions and information about the experiences your business provides. Passively “listening” to them is not enough. Find deeper and more meaningful insights with proactive, in-the-moment engagement.