How IVR Surveys Improve Customer Satisfaction

IVR surveys can increase your business’ customer satisfaction by providing clear and immediate feedback on customer interactions you can use to improve your processes, policies and employee training. Dynamic surveys select questions based on previous answers, or based on information about customers already in your CRM, enabling you to get more useful information with fewer and more relevant questions. This can increase survey completion rates and provide more of the data you need to improve service based on feedback.

Collect Customer Feedback

It should be obvious that the sooner you can ask for feedback, the more valuable the information you will receive. Not only will customers remember their interaction with you in more detail and more accurately, they will also better remember how that interaction made them feel. Being able to remember these in more detail is also why more immediate feedback requests such as IVR surveys can achieve higher response rates from both satisfied and unsatisfied customers.

By providing an immediate avenue for feedback that responds to the customer’s answers, IVR surveys have the potential to flag issues and sticking points faster than other feedback methods, and also have the potential for less biased responses. This is because your IVR can ask customers to complete a post-call survey in advance of them speaking to an agent, meaning they have agreed to do this before being influenced by their interaction with an agent. When feedback is requested post-interaction, this can skew the results and paint an unclear picture. On the one hand, customers are generally more likely to leave feedback when they have had a negative experience, however if requesting feedback is left down to agents, it is only natural they will prefer to ask when they can be sure of positive feedback.

Another advantage of IVR surveys is that customers are still on the phone to you as they complete the survey and you can ask to connect them back to an agent after they complete it. This can be useful when the IVR survey receives highly negative responses from a customer. Not only does this show your customer you really do care what they think and lets you take another opportunity to resolve the issue and turn the situation around, opening a dialogue with your unhappiest customers can bring the areas you need to improve into focus.

Exit Surveys

IVR exit surveys are a great way to follow up with a large volume of leads or attendees after an event or conference, in addition to collecting feedback you can use to improve the next event and work on future presentations. Thanks to the ability to survey hundreds of attendees at once, you can collect feedback within days of the event closing while it is still fresh in their minds. By offering to connect respondents to a live agent or leave a voice message instead of selecting a pre-recorded answer, this can also be an effective method of collecting a large number of testimonials.

Medical Surveys

IVR surveys can be used by medical professionals to improve efficiency and reduce waiting times by evaluating and updating patients via an automated phone system. Surveys can be used to assess symptoms using branching questions, or enable patients to check on the results of their tests without waiting on hold. This lets medical professionals spend more time with their patients and less on routine phone calls, as patients can be connected to a member of staff based on their symptoms or survey answers, and can provide doctors with their symptoms and background via the IVR while they are waiting on hold.

Market Research

IVR surveys aimed at your target demographics are a great way to conduct fast and cost-effective market research. A dynamic survey allows you to collect critical information about the needs and opinions of your ideal customers. This could include gauging their awareness of the problems you solve, whether they already use a competitor and what they are currently unsatisfied with, as well as the services and features they want in the future.

Recognize and Reward Customer Satisfaction

In addition to providing actionable feedback, incorporating customer satisfaction IVR surveys into your evaluation of agents can have a direct impact on employees’ performance and job satisfaction. Contact center agents are typically assessed primarily on hard statistics like the volume and duration of calls they handle each day. While it is undoubtedly important to track these metrics to ensure efficiency, it is also important to remember they don’t tell the whole story. Even metrics like callback rate don’t give much indication whether customers finished the call satisfied or not.

When there is no clear evaluation of customer satisfaction, your agents’ performance will reflect this, as they are being incentivized to prioritize speed over satisfaction to hit their targets. With post-call IVR surveys your agents can check reports of their recent feedback and overall satisfaction score and can be evaluated with this in consideration. This can allow you to get a more complete picture of agents’ performance and makes agents feel more comfortable going above and beyond for customers at the expense of their stats.

IVR surveys enable you to improve customer satisfaction by providing highly relevant feedback on an immediate basis. Implementing these as part of how you evaluate your contact center agents incentivizes a more customer-first approach, as well as giving more recognition to your most customer-friendly employees.