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by Erich Dietz, Director of Contact Center Relations, Mindshare Technologies - October 7, 2011

Maximize Your Post-Contact Surveys
By Erich Dietz, Director of Contact Center Relations, Mindshare Technologies, ecdietz@mshare.net, (801) 743-7557

Let’s play pretend. Pretend that you just inherited a corn farm (a la Kevin Costner in “The Field of Dreams”). Common sense tells you to pick the corn, not build a baseball field. But how and when do you harvest? And how do you know what to do with the corn once you’ve got it all?

Now back to reality, you’re a call center director or VP. Common sense tells you to get feedback from your customers after they have interacted with your operation. But surveys are most effective and efficient when administered at the right times using the right methods. And once you’ve got all that feedback, it’s worthless if you don’t handle it right.

Plant Your Surveys

The more accurately you deploy your post-contact surveys, the more you can improve operations, and thus the more money you can make. To accomplish this, it’s crucial that you survey customers at the right time and in the right ways:

• Immediately following their experience: At each touch point in the process, allow customers to provide feedback about that touch point (contact center, post-fulfillment, post-home service, etc.)

• Match the mode: If a customer interacts with you via the voice channel, allow them to continue that experience with an IVR survey. If they are communicating via email, give them a link to an online survey (same with chat). Don’t mix them. For example, if you want feedback about how the phone call went, do not send an email invite after the interaction. Especially if it’s time delayed because you want the interaction fresh in the customer’s mind.

• Fully automated invitations: In 95% of instances, a fully automated invitation process is best. Take it out of the agent’s hands, thereby maximizing data integrity.

• Show You Care About Their Feedback: You’re asking your customer to give you two valuable gifts, their feedback and their time. WHENEVER possible, offer them an incentive to take your survey. An incentive shows the customer how important their voice is to you, encouraging them to offer their opinions. Another way to show how much you value their time is to only take a small amount of it. Try to keep your IVR surveys to approximately 2-3 minutes and your web surveys 3-5 minutes.

Collect the Crunchy Feedback

You’ve got to have some “crunch” to your feedback to fully utilize it. Base your surveys on collecting feedback you can use.

• Survey for the Subjective, QA for the Objective: Ask your customers questions that only they can answer. Nobody but the customer should measure an agent’s friendliness and empathy (or other soft skills). Only a customer can measure their own satisfaction. Use your Quality Assurance or Quality Measurement programs to measure more compliance-oriented metrics that customers may not even notice or care about.

• The 3 Ps – People, Process, Products: To get the full customer experience and perspective, ask your customers how they felt about your 3P’s: your people, your processes, and your products. Feedback in all three areas will benefit your operations improvement. Additional items to measure include the method and wait time, or the confidence and reassurance that the customer felt during the interaction.

• Measure 1st Contact Resolution: A call center should always use 1st Call Resolution strategies to determine if the call center has served their customers entirely on each call. However, it’s important to also get feedback on 1st Contact Resolution. Has your customer reached out to any other brand touch point regarding this issue or question before calling the center? Did those other contact points help? Why and why not? You’re not just a call center, you’re a contact center working alongside several other channels within your brand.

Take Your Feedback to the Market

Feedback loses value if it’s not handled correctly. You can use your feedback to find out which agents are leaders and which are laggards. Use it to track progress on certain service initiatives, like whether or not your agents are generally friendlier or faster.

• Coach to the Controllables: As a contact center director or VP, you want everything to run perfectly. But you simply can’t control everything and neither can your agents. Use your customer feedback to coach your staff on the things they can actually control. Your agents can’t control products and company policies. But they do control soft skills such as friendliness, tone, knowledge, and level of ownership.

• Take Your Feedback the Extra Mile: You don’t have the time and money to manually mine into your customers’ comments, pull out the insights you can use, and track your improvement. Many Voice of the Customer (VOC) companies offer tools that help you get the most out of your feedback. Mindshare Technologies has a new innovation coming out next month (June) called Mindshare Comment AnalyticsTM, which combines a Speech-to-Text transcription service with our Text Analytics suite. It transcribes customers IVR survey comments (callers’ opinions from open-ended questions) and analyzes it together with structured data (the scores and facts callers provide). By doing so, Mindshare extracts common problems from the feedback and discovers possible causes of both positive and negative scores (e.g. the word “rude” is highly correlated to poor customer experience scores with Suzy the agent?!).
Mindshare then places the facts in easy-to-understand graphs and dashboards, allowing Contact Center directors and supervisors to track operations improvement with the feedback they collect.

• Communicate Feedback-inspired Changes: Tell your customers about changes you’ve made due customer feedback. Illustrate to them that you’re listening and that their feedback matters. Research shows that businesses drive higher customer engagement and survey response rates when they proactively tell customers what they are doing with their feedback. For example, if your business changed a policy based on customer feedback, place a very brief prompt on the IVR to tell customers what you changed.

Recover the Fallen Produce

If you lose a stalk of corn in the harvesting process, don’t just leave it behind. Turn your “lost” callers into brand promoters. According to TARP research, a customer who complains about a company and is later satisfied by that company is 8% more loyal than a new customer. So when a customer gives your call center low scores …

• Call Them Back: Talk to your agents and find out why the customer felt so negatively and call them back. Resolve the issue and apologize. Inform the caller that you spoke with the agent, changes have been made, and promise that the issue will never happen again. If possible, empower your agents with the ability to offer the dissatisfied caller some sort of gift or token of regret.

The most important way to maximize your post-contact surveys is to show every caller that you care about them personally, from the greeting to the call-back. Treat every caller like a meticulously tended corn field, transforming them from callers into golden stalks of company stock.