It’s amazing the number of IVR surveys that fail to capture true customer sentiment because they don’t include open-ended questions. The best way for call centers to improve their own performance and enhance customer loyalty is with unbiased feedback. The only way to get truly objective feedback is to encourage customers to respond in their own words, no holds barred.

The Basics of Bias

Let’s face it, all surveys have some bias. Automated IVR systems eliminate the human factor so they don’t introduce interviewer bias in the responses, but the nature of the questions themselves skews the results. Multiple choice questions still limit the response choices, so you only measure based on the limited parameters you create. Garbage in, garbage out. Bias often is introduced when creating the survey, especially if you are looking to validate a preconception or looking to generate a specific outcome. Too often surveys are structured to meet management expectations rather than getting unbiased feedback.

Let’s consider two of the basic biases typically introduced in multiple-choice surveys:

1. Answer option bias – When presenting a list of potential responses, where the response falls in the list can influence the response. If the respondent is in a hurry, there may be primacy bias, where they choose the first answer that they agree with in a race to move through the survey. There also may be recency bias, where they choose the answer at the end of a list since it is more memorable.
2. Question order bias – The order of the questions asked can create bias as well, especially as you seek more detailed information. If you move from more generalized questions to more specific questions, you tend to get a more accurate response. For example, if you begin with a broad question such as, “Were you satisfied with the product?” then ask about specific features and functions, you start from a general question and then ask the respondent to defend their initial response. If you reverse the order of the questions and start with more specific questions, such as “Did you like X feature?” then conclude with a question about overall satisfaction, you will get a different response based on the cumulative effect of the survey questions.

At last, we not only get to “why?” but we also get to “what can we do better?”

No matter what type of I survey you create, avoiding bias is always challenging. If you want uncensored feedback you have to use open-ended questions. However, you have to avoid bias in the way you form the question if you are seeking accurate customer experience feedback. For example, asking the question “What did you like best about your call center experience?” will yield a substantially different response than if you ask, “Was your call center experience satisfactory?” How you phrase the question will obviously skew the results.

Tell Me Why?

Too often companies become so focused on net promoter scores (NPS) and customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT) they forget to ask the most important question, Why?

Of course, you want to know if the customer is happy, would they buy again, would they recommend, and so on. Above all, you need to know why they are happy, disappointed, or gave the response they did. The only mechanism to get to “why” is an open-end survey question.

We have the technology to get to “why?” Real-time automated speech recognition and transcription allows us to collect and analyze open-end responses, including capturing sentiment-emotion data. Assessing qualitative customer responses in real-time is already revolutionizing call center response. Real-time analysis of open-ends provides the detailed data required for closed-end service recovery. At last, we not only get to “why?” but we also get to “what can we do better?”

There is no reason to throw away valuable data. Adding open-ends to post call center IVR surveys can provide invaluable and rich insight about customer experience, with three to five times the data you get from an SMS or an email survey. If you are really dedicated to improving call center performance and optimizing the customer experience, you need to give customers a chance to really tell you what they think.

There is nothing like forced isolation to make people want to connect. The shelter-in-place orders being enforced across the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are testing all of us to stay indoors and practice social distancing, and many are just tired of sitting around the house. In response to forced isolation, more people are picking up the phone and accepting phone calls, including answering CX IVR voice surveys.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon has seen an average of 800 million calls each weekday since stay-at-home orders have been issued, which is twice the volume they typically see on Mother’s Day. And people are talking longer. AT&T reports that wireless minutes usage is up 39 percent and Wi-Fi calling minutes are up 78 percent. People now have the time and inclination to spend more time on the phone as a way to connect with the outside world.

PinPoint Research has seen a 22 percent rise in customer call center post-call IVR surveys, and an increase in response rates to 40 percent.

We are seeing the same phenomenon increase the number of incoming queries to customer call centers. Our research shows that call center traffic is up 22 percent as more people use their phones to address their questions rather than submitting an online query or sending an email. The telephone always has been a preferred means of customer comments, and now that everyone is isolated more consumers are using the phone to reach out to companies, retailers, and service providers.

What’s more important, people are answering the phone as well, including outbound customer IVR surveys. PinPoint Research has seen a 22 percent rise in customer call center post-call IVR surveys, and an increase in response rates to 40 percent. An unexpected side benefit of the nationwide quarantine is we are gathering more customer response data than ever before.

Learn More About Your Customers in Crisis

If there is a silver lining to the current health crisis it’s that we have an opportunity to engage with customers to a degree we have not in the past. Where markets like financial services and healthcare see customer support calls as the norm they are now being deluged with more incoming calls than they can handle. Retailers, service providers, and other market segments are seeing a similar flood in telephone support traffic. As everyone struggles to keep up with call volume, assessing customer experience (CX) is more important than ever before.

Measuring CX after a call center engagement has become common practice. Now, however, your customers are more willing to engage at a deeper level. Using follow-up IVR survey calls you can learn more about customer perceptions and brand engagement by asking more complex questions.

This also is the ideal time to adopt open-ended questions as part of your IVR surveys. People want to be heard and giving them a forum to share their views will give you more detailed and candid responses than ever before. Open-ended questions tend to be less biased, and recording spoken responses are more representative of the customer, providing more qualitative data for analysis. And by adopting automated voice transcription technology, you can quickly convert open-end responses into a rich data archive to feed analytics and learn more about customers’ perceptions and needs in this time of crisis.

Use Open-End Engagement

Remember, however, that conventional call center platforms are not designed to conduct CX research. Most IVR survey platforms are inflexible and make it difficult to customize queries and responses. They can be slow to deploy and lack integration with other technologies and operational systems. They also tend to lack real-time reporting and normalizing responses for database storage can be slow and painful.

When you choose the right Voice Driven Surveys^TM you eliminate many of those problems. With support for real-time transcription, you can turn IVR surveys into actionable responses. Analytics and machine learning makes it possible to immediately identify dissatisfied customers or call out issues that need immediate attention, flagging those respondents for a return call from the customer service team.

Major brands make a big investment in deploying CX and VoC IVR surveys that reach hundreds of millions of consumers every year. Have you ever stopped to consider the impact those IVR surveys can have on your brand? Sure, following up with customers and prospects shows you care about their opinion, but what does that interaction do for your brand?

We are seeing a new trend among CX practitioners – using the content and design of IVR surveys to enhance and support corporate branding. Today’s consumers expect an experience that reinforces brand association at every touchpoint. In fact, brand loyalty and affiliation often is a primary motivator for survey participation. Surveys are part of the brand experience and should be designed to support the brand as well as data gathering.

When you consider that the cost of a branding campaign can run to tens of millions of dollars, using the CX survey experience to reinforce brand awareness offers an attractive opportunity to support branding initiatives. For example, a typical CX survey may require 3-5 minutes to complete, and many brands will interview millions of consumers a year. This means uninterrupted opportunities to engage the consumer during a survey equal to 3-4 million impressions with a brand experience equal to approximately 4M minutes per million interviews. Wow, what is that worth in pure brand advertising placement?

However, to be successful, CX professionals and marketing need to work together. The survey needs to yield insight as well as delivering a brand message, and too much focus on branding will defeat the purpose of data gathering.

To promote survey participation, the brand message has to be delivered in a manner that is innovative and catches the participants’ attention. Pinpoint believes that each mode of CX survey offers a unique opportunity to create a brand touchpoint using images, voice, and brand language embedded in the survey that promote brand interest as well as gathering customer data.  We believe IVR voice surveys offer a unique ability to leverage voice to enhance the brand experience.  (Contact PinPoint for samples of branding IVR surveys)

PinPoint has developed a best practice for designing surveys to maximize brand experience. Some of these best practices include:

1.      Leveraging an executive or thought leader as the voice of the business to promote brand recognition and emphasize the importance of listening to the consumer.
2.      Incorporating branding terms and language that build brand association.
3.      Designing the survey to focus on the journey touchpoints.
4.      Creating questions that elicit a more constructive dialog with the consumer.
5.      Utilizing language that motivates the consumer to provide qualitative data that drives ideation exportation.

Customers reach different “moments of truth” in the CX journey, and innovative survey design coupled with best-of-breed survey modes, like IVR voice surveys, can be deployed at strategic touchpoints to both reinforce and assess recent experience with the brand.

CX surveys offer an untapped opportunity to enhance the brand relationship, and CX practitioners need to view CX surveys as an extension of brand marketing.  Contact us for a free consulting meeting to discuss how to get more value from customer experience research.

Customer experience (CX) research has been experiencing dramatic evolution in the last decade which has, in turn, changed CX strategy. In recent years customer satisfaction research has been turned upside down by the rapid evolution of the digital customer experience. The historical norm of siloed customer satisfaction survey projects reported on a monthly or quarterly basis has evolved into real-time omni channel data collection spanning the entire customer journey, from acquisition to long-term client retention and value growth. Further, there is a new demand to integrate all employees into CX reporting and motivation. Every employee in the company has an opportunity to enhance the customer experience, which has driven CX vendor to deliver multi-level reporting that integrates analytics spanning survey, social data, operational data, etc.

The goal today is not to simply report on a customer satisfaction metric, rather it is to make customer satisfaction an integral component to company strategy and employee motivation.

To achieve this goal, CX vendors must look for best of breed solutions throughout the customer journey. One such solution is the Voice Driven Data Collection™. Voice Driven Data Collection utilizes telephone and mobile devices to maximize the opportunity to capture both quantitative and qualitative data within a omni channel environment by converting voice response into actionable data.

The premiere survey methodology for capturing voice driven data is IVR surveys. IVR offers a flexible survey methodology for mobile consumer enabling voice and keystroke-driven input. Statistics show that IVR surveys tend to provide the highest response rates in outbound survey methodologies, and they offer the ability to gain insight immediately after a consumer interaction with a call center. What this means is that a broad demographic population can provide survey data response that reflects a more accurate representation of the consumer’s experience with rich quantitative and qualitative data.

More importantly, IVR surveys uniquely enable an ability to capture responses through open ends, the actual voice of the customer, providing actionable attitudinal and ideation insights to understand the “why” of consumer CX measurement. This ability to capture consumer voice is particularity important when considering the dramatic decline in open ended data associated with web, mobile, and text surveys.

Integrating IVR survey data collection is a key component to making the Voice of the Customer actionable in today’s CX strategy.