Sane Surveys and Smart Business VoIP Keep Customers Happy

Good customer service is a must. A recent Interactive Intelligence Customer Service Research Study found that most respondents consider quality customer service part of doing good business.

Part of delivering good customer service is not harassing customers with long and onerous customer surveys as well as allowing them access to VoIP to contact the business with ease.

“Surveys can be tremendously helpful to small business owners when testing out a new product or getting a general read on service effectiveness,” noted Kambria Nagy in a recent Nextiva blog post. “But on the flipside, they can also make customers feel a little badgered.”

It isn’t that customer surveys should be avoided. They just need to be done right.

Part of delivering a good survey is offering it quickly. It is best to capture the temperature of the customer’s experience immediately or as the interaction is happening, according to Nagy. Make sure that surveys are sent out less than 48 hours after the customer has interacted with the company. Longer than that, and memories fade or distort.

It is even more crucial that customer surveys are easy. Surveys need to be extremely easy to fill out so they are not a burden to the customer. Above all else, this means making them short—five questions or less.

Spacing out surveys also is important, according to Nagy.

“Be careful not to send surveys too often,” wrote Nagy. “Customers should feel like the survey is important; overkill can lessen that concept.”

A good phone system also can help deliver good customer service; the customer service research study also showed that people between the ages of 18-64 prefer to talk to a live agent over the phone when interacting with a company’s contact center.

VoIP can help enhance the customer service experience.

A VoIP system can make it easier to transfer calls to the appropriate destination, cutting down on wait time. Adding VoIP also can add a personal touch to a call by delivering a friendly greeting to callers by using an auto-attendant feature common to VoIP systems.

Businesses also can improve the customer service experience by not only cutting down wait time, but also by making the actual transfers faster by cutting down on numerous redirects that often are necessary with traditional phone systems.

At the end of the day, keeping the customer happy is more important now than ever before. The Internet has made competition fierce, so delivering a good customer service experience can be a key differentiator. Keeping surveys non-invasive and leveraging VoIP are two methods for making sure the experience is a pleasant one.

Edited by Jamie Epstein