Do all of your customers receive the same survey?

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“Do all of your customers receive the same survey?” is one of many questions that is included in the 25 Mistakes to Avoid with Post-call IVR Surveys eBook and self-assessment. Constructing the eBook and self-assessment diagnostic questions was due to an unyielding passion and purpose. The purpose is to help others leverage customer insights to improve their desired outcomes (loyalty, sales, cost control). The passion is to leverage what works, scientific evidence, and to eliminate dysfunctional practices.

Since inventing post-call IVR surveying for contact centers 20 years ago, it has been a personal crusade to end survey malpractice and make lives better for those that are committed to service excellence. Please join me in this crusade by commenting on articles on our blog and sharing it with your fellow customer experience and contact center colleagues.

Why is this a problem?

We are too young to have heard Henry Ford say that you can have any color car that you want, as long as it’s black, but we’ve all heard the quote. Our lives are now filled with the ability to customize almost everything. We all expect choices and are disappointed when there are few. As I sit on a plane writing this, the flight attendant just told my husband that they only have two kinds of beer – Budweiser and Miller Lite. Probably because he doesn’t care for either kind, he refused to believe that they only have two choices. It took a small argument to get her to go to the galley to verify that this was true. Good to know that they do also have Heineken (another issue that she claimed that they didn’t), but still, there are only three choices when you’d expect five or six from a world with hundreds of kinds of beer.

Customers interact with your contact centers to ask about one of many products and services. You plan for this by cross-training your agents and you have a unified desktop environment to provide a knowledgeable agent to the callers. With all of the variety in the world, why is the implementation of a customer feedback program designed to fit every call or customer interaction? Think about the information you are collecting in your surveys. There are a set of questions (hopefully more than 3) which are designed to capture the customers’ evaluation of the service interaction.

One size doesn’t really fit most when you think about the dynamics of your service interactions so why would you have one survey for everyone? The simple answer is that too many customer experience measurement programs are simplified to the point of ineffectual. Many believe that post-call IVR surveys must be very short (article: Do you have a rule to keep your post-call IVR surveys short?) so there is little for the customization that we all must have. It’s an easy trap to fall into if you do not fully understand the implications with data collection and interpretation.

During the many customer experience measurement design meetings that I have led, the difference across the customer segments always becomes a hot topic for discussion. When given latitude, the management team will gravitate toward the need for a variety of measurement instruments and not just settle for one. For example, Sales calls are reportedly different than Service calls and warranty assistance calls are different from pre-sales inquiry calls. Doesn’t that make sense? Sure, it makes sense to assume that a different set of skills are needed to effectively handle the different types of calls that you take, but you cannot actually have a unique survey for every call type. Imagine the data analysis challenges that would arise if there were 50 unique surveys.

The Solution

Recognize that there are a core set of customer service delivery attributes that need to be measured across all customer segments, but the need to customize the survey for a few is necessary. You must have the ability to design a solution to allow for such customization and you should settle for no less than that ability for your post-call IVR survey solution.

Take for example measuring the customer experience with a Sales call versus a Service call. There needs to be attributes about the contact center agent (let’s say five questions) and several company level questions that can be compared across call type but there are also unique constructs for each. For Sales calls, you want to know if they purchased and why not if they didn’t, while the Service calls need to produce metrics about call resolution.

Your post-call IVR measurement program needs to have the ability to accommodate different types of callers in addition to measuring the core set of comparable questions. Responses to certain questions need to guide a caller down the appropriate path to fully explore the customer service interaction. A certain amount of customization is necessary to produce the right analytics for the effective management of your center. Settling for anything less than this will be costly to your organization.

So you must keep telling yourself, the exact same thing does not work for every customer and neither will my surveys.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jodie Monger
Jodie Monger, Ph.D. is the president of Customer Relationship Metrics (CRM) and a pioneer in business intelligence for the contact center industry. Dr. Jodie's work at CRM focuses on converting unstructured data into structured data for business action. Her research areas include customer experience, speech and operational analytics. Before founding CRM, she was the founding associate director of Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality.

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