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In a classic episode of Seinfeld, Jerry chides a car-rental clerk that anyone can take a reservation, but she doesn’t know how to hold a reservation, and “that’s really the most important part of the reservation – the holding.” And when it comes to customer feedback, there is a similar paradigm. Any company can take customer feedback, but the most important part of the process is using it to improve the customer experience.

That’s where the folks at Vocalabs come in.

 Vocalabs’ goal is to help companies use feedback to improve the customer experience. President and CEO at Vocalabs, Peter Leppik, stated that he finds that companies often have no feedback process at all, or one that is not working, perhaps because there is no accountability or credibility in the data.

Ultimately, since the goal is to improve the customer experience, so it is important to design and implement a feedback process that is actionable, credible, useful and persuasive. Feedback, says Leppik, should give a deeper understanding of customers so companies can make changes when necessary.

The vast majority of Vocalabs’ feedback comes from follow-up interviews, where live people call customers within three to five minutes of the experience. This makes it easier to get a response and customers will take the feedback process more seriously, feeling like their responses are actually going somewhere.

This process also allows for added depth in the follow up questions, adding in human intelligence that can actually make use of the information.

One company that found great success with Vocalabs is C Spire. The mobile phone company used the Vocalabs feedback process with all of their customer interactions: phone, Web, brick and mortar, SMS, etc. It found that customers were annoyed with the way the C Spire contact center handled billing authorization when dealing with non-primary account holders.

But thanks to the Vocalabs feedback, C Spire was about to change its authorization process to make it much easier. This resulted in a big service recovery win for the company, and it changed its training process.

Vocalabs offers a toolkit that allows companies to build processes to fit their needs. Leppik stresses that customer feedback is step one, but the reporting and delivery is even more important. Some competitors merely provide spreadsheets on a monthly or yearly basis, but the feedback experts at Vocalabs have a near real-time reporting process, with many different kinds of reports depending on customer needs.

One other focus of the company is syndicated research. It publishes ongoing studies about customer experiences with many companies across several verticals, as well as “horse race reports” on larger firms.

Leppik emphasizes that Vocalabs is a service company, not a software or hardware firm. It’s all about relationships. It partners with companies in the speech space and has many new partnerships coming soon. It continues to aim to create ideal customer experiences as part of its differentiation. And unlike the character in that Seinfeld episode, it can deliver on all aspects of the customer feedback process.

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