“Do you have a rule to keep the survey very short?” is a question that was included in the 25 Mistakes to Avoid with Post-call IVR Surveys ebook and self-assessment. The ebook and self-assessment contains numerous diagnostic questions to help you to identify many of the common mistakes companies make when implementing post-call IVR survey programs. Twenty years ago when I invented post-call IVR surveying in contact centers, surveys that were too short was not the common problem like it is today.
Why this is a problem
The pace of everyone’s life has noticeably accelerated over the past 10 years. It seems that few have any patience to wait at all for anything which makes your call center uber-sensitive to the amount of time a customer waits for service. You deal in the world of seconds with a goal to save as many seconds as possible in the IVR and during the service experience for each customer. The customer experience is affected by the length of wait time and the call duration, however it’s certainly not as important to the customer as call center managers have grown to believe. The managers’ game of seconds is an operational cost concern but should not be an emotional response to the sensitivity to the customers’ time.
The same emotional response is too often applied to customer experience measurement programs. Someone in your company, perhaps even you, believes that a customer will not answer more than two or three questions on post-call IVR surveys. Have you been told by an executive that you can ask no more than three questions to avoid annoying the customers? Honestly, this is one of the pervasive opinions that we hear from countless call center managers and it is simply an emotional response that undermines the value of the entire customer experience voice of the customer program.
The value of customer experience measurement programs is entirely dependent on the design and implementation. When the post-call IVR survey is limited by an arbitrary rule for the length, the metrics measured are limited. You can forget customer experience analytics. Without a robust set of experience metrics, the customer experience is not adequately defined and interpretation of the results is not actionable. Two or three questions may provide some nice-to-know directional feedback but do not think that you are measuring the customer experience and know specifically what to do.
Solution to the Problem
To experience greater success with your post-call IVR survey program in your contact center you must learn about the science of customer research (social science) and have this lead the implementation and operation. It is not uncommon to field a three to five minute survey to capture the necessary customer experience metrics with a post-call IVR survey. And customers do consistently complete it. A great deal of information can be captured so you can get actionable insights that you just can’t get with a three question survey. Each of my clients has different survey lengths, each consistent with the level of involvement the customer has with the organization. And I monitor customer drop-out. While experience can help me to define the right length for a survey, it is the customer that must ultimately decide what is too long, not me or you (or some executive either).
