Using the right survey tools is important to close the loop on call center interactions. However, using the right survey formats and following IVR survey design best practices is equally important. A poorly structured survey is worse than useless; it can create misleading results that skew the findings so you get a false perspective on the customer experience.

For any post-transaction survey, the goal is to get the customer to complete the survey and ensure the results are an accurate reflection of the call center experience.

In the rush to gather results, best practices for creating a meaningful, valid response can be overlooked. For any post-transaction survey, the goal is to get the customer to complete the survey and ensure the results are an accurate reflection of the call center experience. While it has been shown that IVR surveys yield meaningful data to gauge call center performance, you still need to follow best practices for survey design:

1. Set your goals – You want to settle on a specific topic for a post-call survey. You can start with broader objectives, such as satisfaction with customer service, product satisfaction, brand awareness, etc., but narrow the focus. For example, was the customer’s issue resolved? Were they satisfied with their interaction with the call center? Are they satisfied with the product? The more specific the topic, the more meaningful the response.
2. Keep it short – Some argue that IVR surveys need to take less than five minutes. You have a little more latitude when using voice-driven IVRs with open-end responses – you want to make sure the respondent can share their views. However, you don’t have to ask more than a few questions. Questions should be simple, and precise, and only ask fewer questions so you can get a more meaningful response in under five minutes.
3. Don’t change your ratings scales – You need to be consistent in your ratings scale to get viable results. If you use a five-point scale then most responses will be within three points of one another, so use a broader scale to gather definitive data. But be sure to use the same scale throughout the survey.
4. Use both keystroke and voice responses – While voice response IVR surveys offer a rich source of data and make it easy for consumers to respond, some people still prefer using a keyboard. To maximize response you need to offer both options – voice and text.
5. Think about motivational language – When crafting your questions, you want to avoid bias using leading phrases but you want to promote a response as well. Use motivational language in your survey instructions but be careful not to influence the response
   

Remember that each survey is a branding opportunity as well as part of the customer experience. You want to be sure to put your best foot forward when creating post-call center surveys to leave a positive impression while gathering meaningful data to improve call center performance.

Make it easy for consumers to tell you what’s on their minds by using clear, concise surveys and respecting their time. Be concise and provide options for a survey response. When you use IVR surveys to collaborate with customers you get much better results.

Can you have a successful omni-channel CX without IVR?

The short answer is No.

I recently attended a large customer experience (CX) conference and it surprised me how many companies believed they have mechanisms in place to monitor their omni-channel CX. Many of these companies have call centers that field hundreds of thousands of calls a year and they have never considered IVR surveys to measure their customers’ call center experience (although many use email surveys to measure the call center or agent). I will be the first to admit that IVR research has the stigma of being old fashioned – my company has been doing it for almost 30 years – but that doesn’t mean IVRs can be ignored or that there aren’t some exciting new things happening with IVR surveys.

There are exciting innovations in the IVR world. Speech-to-Text has come a long way in recent years. We now have an 88-90% accuracy rate using an out of the box survey model and it can get higher with tuning. Why is this important? Well IVR open-end comments are the longest compared to other methodologies. Some studies show that they are seven times longer and more comprehensive than web and SMS comments. This means richer comments, more insights and more data to feed into your text analytics.

There also is an increased need for redaction technology. We are seeing our customers in the Finance, Healthcare and other regulated fields using redaction software to remove Social Security Numbers, Banking Number and any other PII (personally identifiable information) from the transcription and open-ends. This means companies can be sure of security compliance since employees can listen and read transcribed open-ends without having to worry about uncovering sensitive personal information.

Another innovation is that IVRs now include a sentiment score that measures the emotion of the respondent when he or she left the open-end response. This score is another data point to help you decide which comments to listen to and how to setup alert.

However, one of the most exciting innovations in applying IVR to measure omni-channel CX is the ability to present real-time feedback. Consider this example. A customer requires a service call at their home. After the installation the technician leaves and the customer receives a phone call using a voice-enabled IVR with a short survey about the installation experience. If the customer leaves an open-end response that there was an issue with the service call, the Speech-to-Text transcription technology and IVR analytics can pick up on the customer’s dissatisfaction and issue an alert. A Customer Service Representative can then look up the customer’s information based on the generated alert, call the customer immediately and resolve their issue. With real-time sampling and reporting customer response time can be reduced to less than 30 minutes.

Without the right IVR system in place to gain customer feedback, the customer journey is incomplete. You need to learn as much as you can about the customer experience to make omni-channel marketing truly pay off.

Customer support call centers continue to be one of the most influential customer experience (CX) touch points in your customers’ journey. Designing and executing customer experience call center CX feedback systems should be one of the highest priorities in any enterprise CEM solution. Unfortunately, for many brands a one-size-fits-all methodology has been used to develop survey and feedback systems to interview customers about their experience following call center interactions. Our experience suggests that the survey methodology and system design needs to align to the unique aspects of customer care call center management.

Here is a list of four key considerations to keep in mind when designing call center survey feedback systems:

1. Acquire customer experience quickly. The best data from customer care and call center service interactions need to be acquired within minutes after the termination of the call. Best of breed solutions use an instantaneous, event-triggered system to engage a consumer who has opted in to a survey. This event triggered surveys offer the highest response rates and the most concise feedback on call center CX.

2. Sentiment data is king. Consumer sentiment is recognized as a key indicator of customer experience and an important metric for customer care. Many vendors wait to measure sentiment in post engagement text analytics processing. Voice driven data collection systems using IVR and speech-to-text models can measure consumer sentiment scores in real time and monitor for keywords and phrases enabling alerts to be delivered for direct intervention by customer care representatives.

3. Integrate operational and research data. Strong analytics are key to managing agents’ performance and making insights actionable. One way of enhancing call analytics that is often overlooked is integrating survey data with operational data. The seamless integration of survey and operational data, including agent ID, is critical to generating comprehensive analytics that can render actionable insight. Survey data system should integrate through API into the call center data allowing seamless integration on the front-end rather than requiring post survey manual integration of operational data.

4. Open-ends are critical to making NPS actionable to the brand. Qualitative insights drive ideation that enables the brand to take action to make measurable improvement in NPS scores. Unfortunately, mobile and text survey have had a direct negative impact on the quantity and frequency of consumer open ends. The only survey methodology that has consistently delivered rich open end data is IVR surveys. Consumers tend to give open end responses that are 3-7 times longer than other survey methods. In addition, with speech-to-text technology these voice open ends are more actionable and cost effective than ever.

As the number of customer service channels continues to expand surveying consumers about their customer experience becomes more complex. Which channel is best for customer outreach and follow-up? What’s the best means for consumer outreach to elicit a complete response? The best answer is to give consumers a feedback channel that matches their individual needs.

We have observed that most consumers prefer to respond to IVR surveys using the same channel as they do for company contact. Being sensitive to customers’ channel preferences tells you a lot about how consumers like to communicate, and the best ways to reach them.

The Telephone Still Rules

The reason for customer contact is what dictates the contact channel. As a 2017 report from The Northridge Group shows, the telephone is still the dominant service channel, especially for time-sensitive issues such as billing, but phone use continues to decline. Fifty percent of those surveyed in 2015 said they prefer they prefer using the phone, but that number dropped to 43 percent in 2017.

The big challenge with telephone support is wait times, which is a universal complaint for consumers, followed by the challenge of navigating the automated customer service system. As a result, we are seeing a growing preference for online chat (23 percent), web self-service (5 percent), text messaging (4 percent), and mobile self-help (3 percent). At the same time, 55 percent of customers find web self-service portals hard to use.

Part of the reason phone service remains the most popular is people prefer human interaction. To shorten time-to-response for incoming phone calls, more companies are adopting call-back functions to eliminate long wait times. Automated call-back and improved scripting tools for agents are making call center response more efficient, shortening response time and reducing call center staffing requirements.

For less urgent issues, most consumers prefer to do their own research and find the answers to their own questions. Seventy five percent of consumers surveyed said they prefer self-service as a fast and painless approach to address service issues, and 67 percent said they prefer self-service over talking to a company representative. Ninety-one percent said they prefer to use the customer knowledge base, and 40 percent call the service center only after they have searched for their answers online. Not surprisingly, Millennials are less patient than Baby Boomers are more likely to call if they can’t answer their own questions.

Match the Survey to the Channel

When consumers do have to contact a company, their preferred method of contact according to research by DMG Consulting is, in order of preference, via email, phone, text, online chat, and social media. However, when receiving correspondence from companies, email is preferred over telephone 60 percent to 21.4 percent. For sales transactions, web self-service and email are preferred over calls and text.

When surveying customer satisfaction, acknowledging the customer’s preferred channel is important. For web queries and email queries, using web and email surveys will typically yield a higher response. For call center queries that clearly have a higher priority for the consumer, responding with telephone IVR surveys is the preferred strategy, demonstrating that their opinion also has a higher priority for the company. It’s all a matter of reaching the consumer in the right context.

When you survey is as important as how you survey. To maintain continuity you should contact customers as soon as possible, showing the same degree of urgency as the inbound query. For telephone queries telephone IVRs sent shortly after the call center contact yields the best results. Not only does a return call with an IVR survey demonstrate the same degree of urgency to provide customer satisfaction, it also can provide more immediate feedback to escalate problem calls. If the customer satisfaction is low, a response can be immediately flagged for follow-up using real-time transcription technology and keyword analytics.

To match survey channels effectively requires a unified view of the customer and customer interaction. This includes the nature of the customer contact, the channels used, and the successful (or unsuccessful) result of the interaction. If the customer prefers email or chat, for example, following up with a phone survey is more likely to discourage response. Online channels offer more convenience where phone survey in response to email queries can be viewed as disruptive.

The best way to capitalize on the right customer service channel is to follow a few simple guidelines:

1. Always use a survey method that matches with the communication medium chosen by the customer.
2. When possible provide consumers with a choice as to their survey channel using a mixed mode strategy.  
3. Use survey methodologies that deliver real-time survey data. This will provide richer and immediate insight into the quality of service and customer experience.
4. Process both closed-end and open-end data in near real-time. It’s the best strategy to leverage data for closed loop recovery.

Consumer channel preferences will vary based on the issue at hand and customer demographics. Customer service questions, for example, are often best handled by phone for urgent matters while sales and product queries are usually handled via email or online. Interacting with customers and consumers on their own terms is the best means to improve survey response rates and promote customer loyalty.