Customer surveying is a critical function for a contact center. Skipping this step – bypassing objective and candid feedback from your customers – will shortchange your operation, your agents and your customers. Post-contact surveys or follow-ups conducted later, either via IVR or Web, can provide critical information toward the continuous improvement of those products and services that customers value most. By omitting valuable customer feedback in your operational performance reviews, your organization can overlook crucial information that affects repeat sales, customer loyalty, and the bottom line.

Customer surveying was once almost exclusively conducted by third-party companies who charged dearly for their services; as a result, it was generally done only by the largest and most cash-flush of companies. Furthermore, it was generally forensic in nature: by the time the survey turned around, problems that were uncovered had occurred long ago. The material was “nice to know,” but it didn't actually help you run your contact center very much.

So what if you had a variety of surveying options built right into your performance management solution? Not only functionality for surveying, but a solution that could turn surveys around quickly, providing you with fast, actionable information?

There are performance management solutions that do this. One such solution, KnoahSoft's (News - Alert)  Harmony Suite, offers an optional, add-on solution that integrates with other product modules such as call recordings and the contact center's IVR system to provide deep insight into the customer and performance data. The component can gather information that might otherwise be overlooked or lost, providing insight into the effectiveness of a contact center's people, products and processes. Most importantly, the results are available quickly, making them actionable, not after-thoughts.

With solutions such as Harmony Suite, you can effectively engage customers immediately after their interactions with your agents via your IVR with short, context-based, dynamic surveys that are delivered based on business rules you define. By targeting specific surveys to customers based on post call customer interactions, cutting-edge survey solutions can deliver response rates far greater than those obtained through traditional, one-size-fits-all questionnaires. As a result, you can move beyond mere random sampling to capture meaningful data — even with large numbers of customers and multiple sites.

If you require a fine focus, you can also drill down and stratify your results by zeroing in on one product, one site, one team or even one agent, helping you uncover very specific areas that require attention and improvement (or commendation, for that matter). Furthering this razor-focus, call recordings and other critical information data such as the agent who handled the call and call detail information can be linked to each survey captured.

Best of all, survey data are available as soon as the information is received. Try demanding that of a third-party survey provider. With survey data resulting from a process that was customized by you in your hands as soon as the surveys are completed, you can determine where your contact center requires improvement now...not where it required improvement three months ago.

To read about KnoahSoft's (News - Alert) Harmony Suite and its surveying module in more depth, visit http://www.knoahsoft.com/pdf/Survey.pdf.