Want to know what your customers really think of your company, your products, or perhaps more importantly, your customer service?
Then why not start asking them?
Automated phone surveys are becoming increasingly valuable to organizations in a wide variety of industries and verticals. Using an IVR, or interactive voice response system, companies can quickly, easily and cost-effectively deliver automated phone surveys to their customers without using any manual labor, such as call center agents, to handle live surveys. This can be an excellent way for a company to augment the customer feedback it already receives through its Website -- the information collected can be combined with other data and used to gain insights into agent performance and customer behavior -- thus it can be used to drive key business decisions.
Some companies are using automated surveys immediately following inbound interactions to find out what the customer thought about the service they just received.
Other organizations, such as banks, are using automated surveys to find out how well their IVR system is working -- for example, following a “self-serve” transaction. Based on the responses received, the bank can “fine tune” IVR functionality to help drive customer satisfaction.
Still other organizations are using automated surveys in outbound campaigns to gather opinions about, or gauge interest in, specific products or services. For example, an electronics manufacturer may go to contract with a call center outsourcer and have the outsourcer use outbound IVR to contact only customers that bought a certain model of television set, to automatically collect their opinions on that particular product.
There is a wide range of opportunities, and methods, for conducting automated surveys over the phone, but increasingly, the main tool used for delivering these automated surveys is the IVR. Today’s IVR systems are both touch-tone and “speech-enabled,” meaning they use speech recognition technology to carry out “natural dialogues” with customers. Thus, a customer has a choice of responding to survey questions either using the telephone keypad or his/her own voice. Research shows that giving prospective survey respondents a choice of either keying or saying their responses increases the likelihood that they’ll take the survey. What’s more, research shows that consumer acceptance of, and participation in, automated phone surveys is growing (however, there are still some
questionable practices going on out there, which continue to slow consumer adoption). Many consumers are coming to the realization that by giving their opinion, the companies that serve them can actually use the information to deliver better customer service.
Typically an outbound IVR system is used in conjunction with an auto-dialer to proactively contact prospective survey prospects “en-masse.” The auto-dialer automatically dials thousands or tens of thousands of numbers, but “skips” numbers that are on the do-not-call registry or when an answering machine picks up or there is a busy signal. If a live person picks up the phone, the system automatically plays an introductory message and gives the prospective survey respondent the option to take the survey. It then offers several options to select from using the IVR prompting system. Should a person decide to take the automated survey, they might, for example, have the option of leaving a voice message or speak directly with a representative. The respondent can also simply decline to participate in the survey.
Depending on the type of network that an organization is using, and also how the system will be used, these automated phone survey systems can be deployed in a matter of days.
IVR vendor
Angel.com, for example, offers a
highly-flexible hosted platform that allows an organization to deploy virtually any type of phone-based survey -- including customer satisfaction, market research, and employee feedback -- in about 48 hours. This ease of deployment stems from the fact that the system is fully Web-based and thus doesn’t require any hardware setup or software installation.
The real beauty of this hosted automated survey solution, which supports both touchtone and speech recognition, is that it can be easily maintained and modified in real-time via a simple-to-use Web-based interface. Not only does this let system administrators view survey results in real-time, they can also quickly and easily modify the surveys -- for example, you can adjust the outbound message or change the branching scheme for responses using the same intuitive Web interface.
Another huge advantage of this system is that it can be readily integrated with your existing reporting tools and analytics software, so the survey responses can be quickly analyzed and combined with other key customer data order to make important business decisions.
Want to learn more about Angel.com’s hosted automated survey system?
Click here.
Angel.com made news in early May when it
announced that it had released Spring Forward, the most recent version of its on-demand product offering. The new release sports added features that “put the caller first” and improve customers’ overall experience by more efficiently solving callers’ problems.
Angel.com also offers
SurveyByFone, a product which
enables salesforce.com users to deploy and manage automated customer satisfaction phone surveys from a salesforce.com account. The company claims surveys evaluating call center interactions, hotel stays, store visits, or any other customer experience can be deployed from SurveyByFone in a matter of hours.