Part of your business success relies on understanding what your customers and clients think of you and your services. Post call surveys also help gauge of customer service agents effectiveness. Yet these surveys are only worthwhile if people respond. These eight tips can help drive responses to your post call surveys.
Post call surveys are a popular tool companies use to question callers about their interaction or transaction with a customer service agent. Contact center as a solution (CCaaS) tools today make it even easier to push out IVR surveys which automate the survey process by getting contacts to respond via keypad or speech to pre-recorded voice prompts. As an included feature, the IVR post-call survey is an easy-to-implement, low-cost tool to gather data that can prove very useful.
Post call surveys can provide data insights into:
- Customer satisfaction
- Customer needs, product/service information
- Agents’ professionalism / knowledge
- Opportunities for improvement
- Likelihood of customer loyalty
Yet an obstacle companies need to address is the low response rate to customer surveys. These strategies can help to increase post call survey responsiveness and completion.
Improving Post Call Survey Responsiveness
#1 Have a Clear Goal
Notice that this was a recommendation to have “a clear goal.” That’s singular. If you are trying to do too many things in the post-transaction survey you’re more likely to overwhelm the respondent and see them drop out of the survey. The greater your focus on a specific goal, the easier it will be for you to design a survey that accomplishes what you want it to do.
#2 Ask Quick Questions
Your caller may already have been on the phone with customer service much longer than they planned. Don’t drive them away from your survey with long, multi-part questions. Keeping questions concise will also help the listener better understand what information you are looking for, which can improve the odds of the resulting data, therefore accurately reflecting the issue you were asking about.
#3 Keep Surveys Short
Time is one of our most limited resources. Don’t waste your customers’ valuable time by expecting them to participate in long-winded surveys asking for input on an exhaustive list of items.
#4 Provide a Time Estimate Up Front
It’s difficult to get customers to start surveys, let alone finish them. Make them more likely to begin the survey by stating at the outset how long the survey should take or specify the number of questions (not more than 10). Most importantly, if you promise a three-minute survey, don’t make it 10 minutes. That’s going to annoy your customers and damage their impression of your brand’s integrity.
#5 Keep it Simple
In a voice-based post call survey, the respondent is listening to the options and must hold onto them in their head to determine the correct response. For this reason, stick to a simple rating scale (typically under 4 options), and always remind them which is the highest or best on your point scale.
#6 Be Prompt
Either invite callers to stay on the line to take a post call survey and transfer them immediately or follow up with a second call shortly afterward. If you wait too long, the customer is unlikely to remember what kind of service they received, which will hurt their willingness to participate and the usefulness of the data they provide.
#7 Know your Audience
If you are surveying every single caller, you’ll have a different survey design than if you are focusing your survey on people who called for a specific purpose, called back several times, or employed multiple channels to interact with your agents. Identifying potential survey participants in advance to tailor questions accordingly can drive greater responsiveness as the respondent will better understand how their answers could be useful.
#8 Test Your Survey
Before launching a survey widely, test it out first in a pilot environment. This can help you identify in advance any stumbling blocks, weed out weak questions, reshape survey order to make the survey easier to understand and check for any technical mistakes.
One more way to make the most of your post call surveys? Partner with a CCaaS solution provider that allows you to customize the survey based on your requirements.
Evolve IP’s CCaaS offers many valuable features, including post call surveys, IVR, callbacks etc. We’re proud to have been named in Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for the 5th consecutive year for the 2nd consecutive year as one of the top contact center providers.
