Collecting Customer Feedback Can Be Cost-Effective and Rewarding

Are you providing good customer service in your contact center? Do you even know? Multiple studies have told us that there is often a disconnect between the quality of customer service a company thinks it’s providing, and the quality of customer service perceived by the customer. Unfortunately for most companies, customers don’t often speak out about poor experiences before they depart to a competitor. For this reason, it’s critical to make customer service feedback a regular part of your call center’s routine.

Most companies don’t have a lot of extra cash to throw to their call centers today, so formal surveying might be a luxury small to medium-sized businesses can’t afford. But the process needn’t be formal and extensive to generate value to a company. A small but regular and well-organized program can work, too, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software’s CEO Chuck Ciarlo.

“A customer feedback program can provide insight into what your customers are thinking, what is most important to them, and how a call center can best satisfy their needs,” writes Ciarlo, who provides some ideas how to best implement a feedback program via different channels.

Through a live agent. Ciarlo urges companies to create a “question of the week” that agents can ask customers at the close of a call. Rather than having it be open-ended (“how did we do today?”) which may not yield useful results, have the agent ask something specific: “how could we have improved your interaction today?” Companies can then gather the results and look for recurring themes.

Through the IVR. Interactive voice response (IVR) systems were once difficult to change and administer, but today’s hosted IVRs are a different story. Ciarlo writes that surveying IVR users provides insight into the effectiveness of the automated system, and in what areas it is perceived as frustrating rather than helpful. Many companies also route customers into a short IVR menu after completion of the call, to have the customer leave instant feedback on the quality of the recent transaction.

From your call recordings. If you’re using a modern call recording solution that includes the ability to search for keywords or other markers easily, you can use those call recordings to spot problems or trends, particularly if your call recording solution has analytics capabilities.

So while extensive customer surveys by a professional third-party organization might be out of your reach, don’t eliminate the possibility of customer feedback entirely: it’s too necessary to successful operations today to ignore.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi