An effective contact center customer survey helps managers identify areas where the team excels while identifying areas for improvement. Creating and maintaining an effective contact center customer feedback loop can be difficult and frustrating. It’s easy to overlook critical factors and miss important steps. Here are the most important questions successful customer feedback program leaders consider when designing and maintaining their contact center customer feedback program.
1. How many survey responses do I need? The more the better! Even though many consider 1% response rates to their contact center customer survey to be acceptable, the truth is 20% response rates and up are regularly achievable. Maximizing response rates are highly dependent on the survey invitation email itself – the email domain can be a critical factor in making sure the email is received, instead of being marked as potential spam, blocked or just overlooked. To ensure that these email invitations are not ignored, send them using your company’s domain. Maintaining your whitelisting along with sending the email from your domain are 2 critical factors that require time and effort but pay immense dividends and, in the end, it will be time and effort well spent to ensure you are able to collect the highest number of responses.
2. What is the right timing for sending survey invitations to customers?
Make sure you plan through the timing on when to send that survey after the customer contact center interaction – and how many emails to send as reminders. The general rule of thumb most folks recommend is to send it immediately, followed by as many daily emails as needed to provoke a response. However, this approach can create more problems and be unproductive. The most critical negative issue is how it impacts your customers’ impression of your brand. Did you consider waiting a day or two – or did you send the survey immediately? Thoughtful consideration of the customer’s reaction to the survey and how quickly you send it will go a long way towards getting the most helpful feedback. Customers have different expectations for different companies across different industries and getting this right can increase your response rate significantly. That is why it is important to consider these factors, and more importantly, monitor, learn and optimize. Getting the contact center feedback cadence right can double your response rate and speed up the time it takes to get that feedback!
3. What do I need to include in my invitation in order to maximize response?
The contact center customer survey email invitation provides a rare opportunity to have a personalized interaction with your customer. For starters, ensure you add specific details about their case into the body of the email. This approach has 2 immediate advantages. First: it helps the customer identify this email as legitimate. Second: it shows the customer that you know them and care about their specific issue. Remember this is not a marketing email, so avoid the temptation to over-“sell” in the survey email invitation. Instead, focus on the fact you have a personal relationship with the customer and that you are using this contact center customer survey email invitation to help deepen this relationship. This is the mindset from which you should approach constructing your contact center customer survey email invitation.
4. What is the right (or best) number of questions to ask the customer?
More than 3. Fewer than 10. There is a big misconception when it comes to contact center customer survey questions that the shorter the contact center customer survey, the better the survey and the higher the response rate. Remember: the goal is to get meaningful and actionable feedback – not simply to hit the highest response rate or garner a high score. Consider this: If I sent you a 1-question survey that asked about your customer satisfaction, customer effort score (CES) or NPS, what actions am I able to take to improve my contact center agents’ performance, based on your response to that 1 question? The answer is none. This is not to say that you should ask 50 questions! You need to choose a set number of questions that provide responses that can be turned into specific actions. Not taking the time to carefully consider the 5 to 10 best contact center customer survey questions for your industry undermines the fundamental goal of this effort: to help your contact center manager make better-informed decisions about their actions and priorities for improving every customer’s experience with your contact center.
5. What are important considerations when designing the look & feel of my customer feedback survey? The best interfaces collect the maximum amount of customer feedback in the easiest and most intuitive way for customers. Even in a survey, your brand should provide a great customer experience – from the amount of time it takes to complete the survey, to the number of clicks to get through the survey, to the visual look and flow of the survey. Why? Because these are your contact center customers and it’s always important to provide them with the best brand experience possible. Having the right survey interface will help improve contact center customer survey response rates and the overall quality of your contact center customer feedback.
The good news is that any contact center can have easy access to the most effective contact center customer survey system by implementing bespokeCX. Many companies like Intel report response rates above 20% and 95% completion using bespokeCX, because this plug-and-play system seamlessly integrates into your data stack, requiring no technical or IT resources to maintain. bespokeCX creates highly effective email invitations and ensures that your emails are delivered by monitoring your inbox and maintaining your whitelisting. Best of all, bespokeCX helps you design the right questions and identifies the right number of questions to ask so that you collect the highest quality contact center customer feedback, giving you easy access to the most actionable contact center customer knowledge. Stay tuned as we dip deeper and bring a new perspective on contact center performance and its importance!
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