The overwhelming majority of contact center surveys completely ignore a huge and important group of customers: those customers who never spoke to an agent.
Now, there are good reasons for focusing surveys on agent-handled calls. Often, a key purpose of the survey is measuring and training the agents, and the agent experience is likely to be less consistent than the IVR. And some contact center surveys do include a question or two asking about the automated part of the call.
But what about those customers who:
- Never needed to speak to an agent because they could self-serve in the IVR
- Wanted to get to an agent, but couldn’t figure out how
- Gave up waiting to speak to a person
- Had the IVR hang up on them (yes it happens, and more often than you think)
- Would have been willing to use the IVR, but found it confusing
Those people are your customers, too, and in many companies there are more of them than the people who actually spoke to a customer service representative.
Chances are, the experience of those customers who never left the IVR is having more of an impact on the customer satisfaction and operational cost of the call center than the customers who spoke to a person.
And most companies are ignoring these customers completely in their survey process.
This is a huge blind spot, and an enormous opportunity to improve the customer experience and save money.
All great points in this article about a company’s IVR – I’d say it could even go deeper than this — what about surveying people from other support channels (FAQ, online chat, email) and asking them if they would use the IVR. Maybe they just missed that as an option. Or a simple poll even that would take 2 seconds or less to complete about whether they would use the IVR or their top support method.
All of this feedback can be used to generate actionable decisions. Thanks for the article!