In recent years, critics and the mainstream media have reported that, thanks to an over-reliance on interactive voice response (IVR) systems, many companies have alienated and frustrated their callers. Today, thanks to IVR, many companies are gathering the kind of critical feedback needed to delight them.
In addition to using IVR in traditional ways as a greeting, routing and self-service tool, leading call centers are tapping IVR to gauge and, ultimately, elevate customer satisfaction. Rather than send recent callers a clunky survey via mail or attempt to poll them live via phone, these centers simply invite callers (while they are waiting in queue or at the end of a call) to rate their experiences after the call by completing a very brief survey. Those who accept are instantly routed to a concise IVR-based automated survey, where they respond to several focused questions using touchtone commands or, if the system features speech recognition, via voice.
While some of these centers have developed or purchased their own IVR-based post-call survey systems, many others have contracted with a third-party vendor that specializes not only in creating and hosting such systems, but also in evaluating results for call center clients. Whether using an in-house or hosted survey solution, the centers are saving time and money on their customer satisfaction measurement processes. More importantly, they are receiving more valid and actionable information than ever before.
"[Real-time] customer feedback is the pulse by which an enterprise can adjust and personalize its designed customer experience to ensure that it meets -- and exceeds, where necessary -- customers' expectations," write analysts at Gartner in a recent report. "The most important aspect of feedback is timing. Gartner has determined that feedback collected immediately after an event is 40% more accurate than feedback collected 24 hours after the event."
Proven Post-Call Survey Practices
Success with IVR post-call survey systems (as with traditional IVR applications) depends on how well the system is designed and deployed. While each call center's specific survey will differ based on its particular goals and its customers' needs and expectations, experts agree that there are several critical practices and components that every automated post-call survey system should adhere to and incorporate.
Survey customers immediately following the call, while they are still on the line. As Gartner says, timing is everything when gathering customer feedback. Not only is routing callers to the automated survey immediately following their interaction with an agent the smart thing to do; it's the easiest thing to do, as well. The caller is already on the phone, thus a quick transfer to an IVR survey is a simple, natural step. It completely defeats the purpose of IVR surveying to wait until several minutes after the call to contact the caller with an invitation to complete a survey. The moment is lost.
Include no more than seven or eight survey questions. The consensus among post-call survey experts is that surveys should contain between six and eight focused questions, and take callers no more than a minute or so to complete. Most surveys make responding simple, often using 1-5 scales (i.e., "press or say '1' if you strongly agree, '2' if you agree, '3' if you ..."; or "please rate the following on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the best and 1 being the worst ...")
"Callers have already spent a considerable amount of their time on the phone with [an agent]," explains Steve Graff, vice president of technology for call center software provider eTalk. "We've found that keeping the surveys short increases the number of people who start to answer the questions, and actually complete the entire survey." Graff and others strongly recommend informing callers of the survey length in the invitation message to so that they are aware of how brief the survey is and, thus, will be more willing to participate in and complete it.
Give callers the opportunity to provide open-ended voice comments. Doing so enables callers to qualify some of their responses and ratings, and, importantly, provides the call center with valuable information and suggestions.
Capturing open-ended comments can also lead to more accurate customer satisfaction findings. For instance, occasionally callers make rating mistakes -- e.g., pressing "1" instead of "5" when they want to rate something favorably, or vice versa. The caller's verbal comments, however, often catches such errors and reveals that a negative rating was actually a positive one.
Callers' open-ended comments can shed more detailed light on ratings in other ways as well, says Dr. Jodie Monger, president of research and consulting firm Customer Relationship Metrics. Imagine, Dr. Monger, says, that a caller rates her experience poorly (scores it, say, a "1" or "2" out of "5"), and provides the following open-ended response when prompted:
"The Specialist who helped me with my problem was wonderful, however, the generalist, Bonnie Harris, that helped me in the very beginning was not. She got very aggravated with me when I had to be transferred to a specialist."
"Without the verbal explanation of the score and without a [quality control] process, this survey would be assigned to the specialist (as the last one to handle the interaction)," Monger explains. "By reviewing the comment and the survey scores in the QC process, it is apparent that the negative scores were actually meant as an evaluation of the generalist, Bonnie Harris."
Design a system to flag highly dissatisfied (and highly satisfied) customers. Of course, taking time to listen to all verbal comments provided by all callers would turn the surveying process into a time-consuming, logistical nightmare. The important thing is for call centers to focus on what the most frustrated customers are saying, as that will reveal what agents and the center most need to improve -- and what most threatens customer loyalty.
Today's advanced IVR survey apps can be programmed not only to recognize when a customer gives an abnormally low overall rating and send an alert to the center manager or quality assurance team, the system can capture -- via CTI -- the caller's identity, and link it to the actual recording of the interaction in question for complete analysis of what went wrong. After reviewing the survey responses and the call, the manager can quickly call the customer to "repair damage" and hopefully restore trust and loyalty.
Many centers also use their IVR survey systems to flag highly satisfied customers, and then use the recordings of the calls that are tied to those favorable ratings in coaching and training as "how to" examples.
Link each survey response to the agent who handled the call. The ability to quickly and easily identify which agent handled each call evaluated by customers is critical to the quality improvement process. It not only helps to identify -- along with call monitoring -- which agents are struggling and which are thriving; the actual ratings and feedback provided by customers can serve as a powerful educational and motivational tool for each agent, say experts.
"Agents find [customer] feedback more meaningful and believable than the ratings they receive from peers, supervisors or quality assurance teams," says Mike Desmarais of call center consulting firm Service Quality Measurement (SQM) Group. "Each agent [is able to] understand which issues are most important to customers and how they are improving."
Dr. Monger agrees. "Connecting real-time caller feedback directly to the agent providing the service has far-reaching benefits. [Based on] our research, agent-level customer feedback increases productivity, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction, and the ROI on training and coaching efforts."
Top IVR survey solutions, like NICE's Feedback IVR Survey system, make it easy for managers and quality assurance specialists to link specific surveys and recorded calls to individual agents. And many progressive call centers have formally incorporated customer feedback from IVR surveys into the center's monitoring program -- providing agents with monitoring scores and customer ratings and comments as part of a single feedback session soon after a call has been monitored.
Use the survey to gauge first call resolution rates. Studies have shown that no other performance metric has as big an impact on customer satisfaction as does first call resolution (FCR) -- and, according to Dr. Monger, there's no better way to measure FCR than via IVR post-call surveys. She says that asking customers directly via post-call surveys whether or not their issues were resolved not only provides a clear picture of the call centeris true FCR rate, it can help the center -- if the survey is appropriately designed -- to discover some of the main causes of repeat calls.
"For those [customers] who had a problem that was not resolved on the call," Dr. Monger explains, "the survey should branch to an open-ended question to capture the customer's description of the problem. This qualitative information adds the explanation to the dramatic quantitative information you now have available. The cause of unresolved calls is invaluable to correcting process issues."
And what exactly does the call center stand to gain from FCR improvements? Just about everything. Research by Dr. Monger, as well as by SQM, has revealed that, in addition to big increases in customer satisfaction, high FCR rates beget lower operating costs, increased upselling and cross-selling opportunities, and lower agent burnout.
Copyright 2007 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
2/1/07, Issue # 2002, page 50.
