Conducting Customer Surveys at Your Call Center

One of the most effective ways companies gauge customer satisfaction — especially in a call center environment — is by conducting surveys. Call centers that conduct well-formulated surveys are able to gather invaluable information that can help guide strategy well into the future.

However, executing a winning survey isn’t quite as simple as many companies expect. Successfully conducting a survey and gathering meaningful results requires the right solution. That means you need the proper script and the right employees to execute that script. You also need a well-defined audience and clear objectives.

To ensure your call center can gather the best information possible, here are some survey best practices.

KISS: Keep It Short and Sweet

Successful surveys typically utilize scripts that are clear and concise. Customers, no matter how much they might love a given company, are less willing to participate in a survey if they think it will take up too much time.

Barclaycard’s Paul McWeeney, head of UK sales and service, said in a recent article that the credit and banking company tries to keep the number of questions in a survey to a minimum.

“Our response rates are typically strong providing the questions are not going to take too much of the customers’ time,” McWeeney said. He did offer that longer surveys can be successful if the expectation is set with customers from the beginning.

Tailor The Survey to The Audience

Another mark of a successful survey is fitting the pool of respondents to the desired goals. Some of the largest and most successful survey organizations in the world have had to adjust their strategies based on changing technology and demographics.

In the case of a company wanting to perform interactive voice response (IVR) surveys through a call center, matching the audience is especially important. For instance, the different users you can reach on landlines versus smartphones can vary widely with regards to age, ethnicity and socioeconomic group. Calling the wrong device can lead to low response rates or — even worse — unhelpful data.

Maintain Consistency

One of the easiest ways to lose potential respondents in an IVR survey is to make the process confusing. Call centers can avoid this by keeping things consistent throughout the call.

Surveys should maintain a simple and understandable scale, a consistent voice (especially in IVR surveys), concise wording, unbiased terms and keywords that matter for actionable results.

Among these, maintaining an understandable scale is one of the most important ways that a call center can conduct a successful survey. For example, when using a number scale of 1-5, you want to be sure that respondents can easily discern if 1 is positive or negative, and stick to that scale throughout the entirety of the survey.

With proper thought and planning, call center surveys can be a great way for companies to gather information about customers and the call center experience. By adhering to best practices when conducting your survey, the data you gather will stand a greater chance of being valid and actionable. This will also make the data you gather more likely to yield positive results for both your call center and the customer alike.

For more information on how technology can help your call center to run smarter, check out our Top 10 List When Considering a Cloud-Based Contact Center Solution whitepaper.