DYK # 22 (A): Did you know that your post-call survey is ripe for a revamp?
Our previous two DYK’s focused on Insights to Action, and this month we’re drilling into the feedback capture mechanisms that fuel your continuous improvement program.
Specifically, we’re exploring the best ways to capture feedback on interactions.
Those interactions can be online or in person, with your products, staff, digital channels, etc. Any type of interaction a customer (or prospect) has with you, creates an experience, and an opportunity to identify what works well, and what we can do better.
We’ll split our interaction feedback best practice DYK into 2 parts:
Part 1: Revamping your post-call survey
Part 2: Revamping your digital channels to capture feedback
Simply too much goodness to share in one DYK!
Before we get started, a word on the future of post-call surveys:
While some argue that the post-call survey is soon to be extinct with the rise of conversational analytics, I’d argue that there’s still a place for it for now, but that the post call survey is ripe for disruption.
I absolutely agree that we need to tap into calls and other contact center data to extract customer feedback and insights. However, I also know that not all companies are ready for that just yet. Whether it’s a question of maturity, budget or tech readiness, for now the post-call survey still has a role to play.
But that role needs to change.
Let’s look into it today with DYK #22 (A) “Did you know that your post-call survey is ripe for a revamp?”
An important part of CX is about understanding the experiences our customers have with us, and continuously improving those. Whether that’s fixing something that’s broken, innovating a new idea, or taking something that’s good, and making it a great experience.
Feedback on interactions is particularly useful, as it helps us understand customer experiences in more detail.
But how do we know what those experiences are like for our customer?
The traditional way to find out are surveys (or research in general). While these days we have more options to capture “the voice of our customers”, including what we refer to as unsolicited feedback, the humble survey still has a role to play.
So today, we’ll look into the traditional post-call survey in more detail, and share some tips to get A LOT more value from them.
When reviewing or answering post-call surveys, I often stumble across some common pitfalls:
They are designed to capture front-line feedback only,
often ask the wrong questions, and don’t let the customer tell their story
and use the wrong metrics to understand the CX (hello there tNPS)
making them lengthy and rather annoying at times.
Let’s check out an example:
I recently had a flight booking that I needed to change, and I did what most people do, I went online to change the flights. First challenge, I couldn’t change the booking myself online, I was forced to call the call center. Despite my booking being available in the online portal of the airline..
So I called, and got it changed to exactly the flight I wanted. I already knew which flight I wanted.
However, I was charged a fee for the call center agent to change the booking on my behalf. Despite me knowing exactly which flight I wanted and wanting to do it myself online. Thank you very much.
After the very friendly and competent agent finished processing my changes, I was asked to provide feedback via a post call survey, on the phone. Great I thought, I can tell them that:
I was annoyed that I couldn’t change the flight myself
I was annoyed that I was charged a fee for the agent to change the booking on my behalf
I spent more time than intended on this rather simple exercise, simply because I couldn’t do it myself online.
BUT, the survey didn’t let me tell them this.
The survey asked about the agent. How satisfied I was, how easy it was to deal with the agent, friendliness, etc. The usual agent performance questions. However, this experience wasn’t about the agent for me. It was about my overall experience trying to change a flight. The experience was unpleasant and required considerably more effort on my behalf than expected. Despite the agent being very friendly.
In this situation, customers are faced with 3 options:
Not providing feedback as the questions don’t match the experience
Providing negative ratings for the agent, as the overall experience was negative
Answering the questions on the agent but not sharing feedback on the actual experience
Neither of those are ideal for the company as they’re not hearing what the customer wants to tell them!
So how can we do it better?
When designing feedback capture mechanisms, make it about your customers, not about you.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But what does that mean?
Here are 4 tips to revamp your post call-survey to get the more valuable, accurate and actionable insights:
Stop using the post-call survey solely for agent performance purposes.
Redesign it to capture the overall experience first.
Give customers the option to say what they want to say.
And then add the agent service element.
It enables you to truly listen to the voice of your customers, instead of chasing agent performance metrics. Keep in mind that the customer contacts the contact center for a reason. They experience friction in their journey and come to the contact center for support. From a CX perspective, we need to understand what the overall experience was, alongside the role the agent played.
I’ve rebuilt VoC programs for well-known brands to include exactly that. It’s a worthwhile exercise.
Why is it important to do this?
Garbage in, garbage out. Make sure you’re asking the right questions to enable quality data to enter your analytics.
You can have the best analytics technology, but if you don't ingest the right data, the quality of your insights, and therefore your decision making, will always be poor.
I often hear that contact center post-call survey feedback data gets “excluded” as the customer rated the agent low on something that’s not agent related. Well, that’s because you’re not asking the right questions to start with!
Not only is it a missed opportunity to receive feedback, you also risk making poor decisions on that data.
So let’s do a better job at understanding customer experiences, capturing accurate feedback, and of course, making great decisions with this data.
If you found this DYK insightful, stay tuned for the next one, where we’ll explore what all that looks like for digital interaction feedback!
#CX #customerexperience #VoC #customerfeedback #contactcentre #postcallsurvey