The importance of the “Voice of the Customer” isn’t an entirely new concept. Although the value of customer experience has increased in recent years, and businesses have begun adopting new strategies to understand and adhere to their audience’s needs, listening to customers has always been a priority.
For years, companies have used feedback in the form of surveys and reviews to keep their finger on the pulse of customer sentiment and engagement.
Surveys provide companies with an opportunity to build on the quantitative metrics collected in the contact center, with detailed insights from real people. They’ve helped brands to pinpoint core trends in the customer journey, and detect pain points they need to resolve. Thanks to the evolution of AI and automation technologies, collecting information from surveys has even become much easier.
Brands can now use conversational bots and automation tools to instantly request feedback from customers at the end of any call or conversation. However, many CCaaS providers have started to discover problems with the survey process. Some leaders have even stopped investing in survey tools completely, believing they no longer deliver the benefits businesses need.
The Problems with Customer Survey Tools
According to prominent CCaaS vendors, survey tools are inherently flawed. Many companies now believe that surveys fail to provide an accurate insight into the voice of the customer for a number of reasons. For instance, most survey solutions only allow companies to collect information from a small sample of customers. The majority of clients a brand interacts with on a daily basis won’t have the time, or the desire to complete a survey at the end of their call.
This means companies make entire decisions on how to improve their customer service strategy, based on feedback from a niche fraction of their audience. Some studies show that as few as 10% of all customers respond fully to an IVR survey.
Not only is the sample size for the data collected from survey solutions limited, but the insights surveys can provide are often relatively basic too. Companies don’t want to overwhelm their customers with too many questions, so they tend to focus on simple questions, like asking clients to rate a call experience on a scale of 1 to 5.
These basic questions deliver equally limited insights into what customers actually think about the service they’re receiving. They lack any meaningful metrics or in-depth insights companies can use to make impactful changes.
Additionally, customer survey tools only look at one side of the customer/company interaction – the experience of the customer. They don’t measure how agent performance throughout the conversation influenced the changing sentiment of the customer, or which actions from an agent increased or reduced the quality of a call. This means companies often struggle to use their survey data to effectively implement coaching and training strategies for employees.
The Alternative Options to Survey Tools
The limitations of most survey solutions for contact center platforms make it easy to see why these technologies are falling out of favor. Companies just aren’t getting the data they need from the handful of surveys customers fill out to initiate meaningful change.