Service Surveillance: Creating and Succeeding with Outbound Telephone Surveys
Outbound telephone surveys can be the ideal way to generate loyalty and learn where your service is falling short.
Where would we be without consumer feedback?
If the contact centre’s role is customer relationship management, then direct feedback from those customers is worth its weight in gold.
But outbound telephone surveys aren’t easy. Customers aren’t always interested in taking time out of their day to help. And even if they do, if you’re asking the wrong questions, you won’t come away with much to show for your efforts.
Outbound Survey Value
Surveys are a great way to measure satisfaction, performance, and the overall health of your contact centre. This type of feedback is just as important as the other service metrics you measure. High first contact resolution and low average handle times don’t mean much if your customers still find reasons to be unsatisfied with your service. Surveys give customers an outlet to be heard outside of your normal feedback channels.
While many consumers aren’t interested in providing feedback, plenty of them are—giving your centre a great opportunity to communicate and build relationships with your customer base. As consumers feel more comfortable with your contact center agents, they’ll be more open to providing honest feedback and criticism. This insight can be leveraged long-term to better address the needs of your customers.
Data by Harvard Business Review found that customers who participated in customer satisfaction surveys over the phone were three times as likely to do business with the company again, and were less than half as likely to switch to a competitor.
Succeeding with Surveys
Of course, the benefits of outbound telephone surveys can’t be found just from slapping a few questions on paper. Overly lengthy or complicated questionnaires will turn off consumers from the get-go, and can be a tedious chore to perform. Keep the following tips in mind as you craft your outbound telephone survey strategy:
Consistency
Failing to keep a consistent survey scale has ruined plenty of good survey results.
A consistent scale means that all customers surveyed are given the same range of parameters for their responses.
For example, it doesn’t make much sense to ask one customer to rate service on a scale of one to ten, while asking the next to rate it on a scale of one to eight. Similarly, you wouldn’t have half of your responders quantify service with a number while allowing the second half to respond with written feedback.
Results aren’t worth much if you can’t compare and analyze them against one another. A consistent scale ensures that your centre doesn’t waste time comparing apples to oranges.
Aim for Quality
The quality of the data you collect will make or break your outbound survey strategy. Many businesses interesting in collecting “good” feedback will unconsciously introduce bias into their questionnaires to achieve the results they want. Just as bad are the businesses collecting meaningless data with questions that elicit arbitrary numbers.
Aim to keep your questions as open-ended and bias free as possible. Provide your customers with the information they need to answer the question, and let them take it from there.
Keep it simple
Survey length has a big impact on completion. Who wants to spend all day providing feedback? Keep outbound surveys short, sweet, and to the point. Determine what questions will provide the most actionable feedback, and don’t waste time collecting data that you won’t use.
Speak their language
It’s easy to default to just surveying your English-speaking customers. Even though they make up the lion’s share of your customer base, it’s a mistake to overlook customers who speak French or other language markets you serve, just because they make up a small portion of your total customers. It shouldn’t be a surprise that you discover insights about your business product or service that is unique to your non-English speaking markets.
Happy Agents, Happy Customers
Friendly telephone survey agents are absolutely critical to survey success. Phone surveys don’t allow face-to-face communication or body language cues that help interviewers build rapport. Friendliness in tone and a pleasant demeanor are all your customers have to go on.
Aside from helping customer feel comfortable, positive survey agents are more likely to elicit feedback. Oh sure, terrible service is pretty good at eliciting feedback too, (American Express found that customers are twice as likely to share bad experiences as good ones), but the point is that customers respond to the type of service they receive. Happy survey agents create happy customers; many of whom will be willing to take a minute and help improve your contact centre.
Survey Success
Customer feedback is the lifeblood of the contact centre.
Hearing direct feedback from customers is the best way to get a pulse of the market you serve. This can be far more influential than simply gathering more data on traditional service metrics. Customers who feel valued by a brand are happier with that brand. Loyalty towards a brand generates business over time. Something as simple as performing an outbound telephone survey can be a golden ticket to better customer satisfaction, stronger loyalty, and more sales overall. Curious about more ways to get the most out of your outbound telephone surveys? Check out our free whitepaper!
