Whether you’re using Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodologies, Customer Surveys are an integral part of contact center management as they help bring to light any issues - or strengths - that are arising in your contact center.
Collecting feedback from your customers post-communication allows you to get insights on:
Personnel:
- Which agents, queues or departments are delivering the most satisfied customers.
- Which agents, queues or departments need improvement or further training.
Product & Company:
- Receive feedback that could inform you about product-wide issues or malfunctions.
- Identify issues that are happening across the company or cross-departments.
Efficiency:
- Understand which questions or issues customers are constantly contacting you about so that you can resolve the gaps through proactivity (i.e. through writing a help guide or support article).
- Gain insight into the customers’ satisfaction with your call handling time to ensure your goals are aligned.
There are a few different ways to administer post-communication Customer Surveys. Based on what we’ve seen with our customers, contact center managers typically offer surveys through their IVR (Interactive Voice Response), or ask for feedback after the call via SMS or email. Contivio takes our survey capabilities one step further than most contact center solutions by offering the ability to store survey responses within most CRMs, including NetSuite.
Phone & IVR-Driven Surveys:
The Benefits:
Collecting survey results over the phone is beneficial because your customer is engaged and has the conversation fresh in their mind, meaning you’ll see higher response rates with the most accurate information. On the phone you also have the ability to connect your customer with a live agent to collect further feedback if necessary, and hear your customer’s responses verbatim.
Another benefit is that you’ll be able to collect survey results quickly, opposed to other methods like Email, which may take longer to get feedback.
The Challenges:
If your call center has a large volume of calls, it can be more costly to collect feedback over the phone. Additionally, keep in mind that your customer likely won’t want to be on the phone for a long period of time, so you’ll want to keep your survey questions short and sweet.
For those who prefer to take customer feedback over the phone, Contivio offers 2 options:
- Include a message in your Welcome prompt to ask the customer if he or she wants to participate in a brief survey after the call. From there Contivio will add the customer to a Campaign, which will automatically call the customer back after a set time period (i.e. 5 minutes or 24 hours) and ask them a series of questions driven by your IVR. From there, the customer will use their dial pad to respond to the questions, and the responses will automatically be stored in your CRM, like NetSuite, against the phone call record.
- Your agent can ask the customer to hold on after the call to participate in a brief survey. From there, the agent will route the call to a Survey queue, which will prompt an IVR (or a live agent) to ask your customer a series of questions. The customer can respond by typing into their keypad, and the output will be recorded in your CRM. However keep in mind that the downside to this method is that if an agent feels the call didn’t go well, they may not ask the customer to complete the survey.
SMS Survey Capabilities:
The Benefits:
As consumers’ email inboxes continue to fill up, many contact center managers are turning to SMS to capture the attention of their customers. SMS response rates tend to be higher than other methods like email and online surveys, and the feedback is often given quickly.
The Challenges:
If you’re texting your customers, you need to ensure you have their cell phone numbers on file, which might not work for some businesses. You’ll also need to make sure your survey is mobile friendly and keep your questions limited so that your customers don’t get bored or distracted.
Contivio offers 2 survey options for SMS, but keep in mind to use these features you need to work with an SMS gateway provider like SMS Global.
- Automatically text your customer upon call completion with a survey link URL (similar to how it would be done via email). Depending on the survey software you use, Contivio may be able to pass call parameters from your CRM to the survey form which will help identify the customer and speed up the questionnaire.
- After the call ends, automatically text your customer a series of questions asking them to rate certain aspects of their experience. All responses will be saved within your CRM for you to reference and pull reporting on. Contivio can also ask conditional follow-up questions if the customer enters a certain score threshold. For example, if the customer rates their call below a 4, we can automatically prompt a follow-up message asking for additional feedback.
Emailing Surveys Post-Communication:
The Benefits:
Email is one of the most cost-effective ways to collect feedback from your customers, and there are many tools available that you can leverage to track the responses back to each customer. With email, you can also get more creative with your survey questions (i.e. you can show visuals) and you can afford to include a few more questions than you can on phone and SMS.
The Challenges:
While they’re easy to deliver, emails may get lost in your customer’s inbox, which may lead to lower response rates. If your survey email does get noticed, it’s likely that your customer will wait to fill it out, which could impact the accuracy of the responses. To get the most success with email, we recommend incentivizing the user to participate, creating a sense of urgency (i.e. enforcing a short time frame, sending a reminder), and personalizing the email to make the customer feel like their feedback matters.
There are several ways email surveys can be sent out, but a couple of common ways include:
- Create a Saved Search or campaign in your CRM and automatically send emails through your CRM with survey links or questions to users who called in or chatted with your team during the past 24 hours.
- Similar to the above, send out survey links or questions via your ESP like Bronto, MailChimp, SendGrid, HubSpot, Marketo or many more.
For more information on how to add survey collection to your Contact Center with Contivio, please feel free to reach out to us at sales@contivio.com or book a free demo.
