Friday Feature: Customer Satisfaction Surveys

This post is part of our Friday Feature series where we look at a part of the Vonage Contact Center platform that you might not be familiar with but we think you might find useful!

What is the main objective of your contact centre? You may well have metrics around your costs, or your average wait time - but ultimately you are probably focused on delivering a great customer experience at what might be a high-stress time for your caller.

As a customer service director if you can monitor customer satisfaction after a contact centre interaction, learn from it and adapt your call plan and agent training as a result, then you have a huge advantage over competitors who are just answering the phone but not improving.

Customer satisfaction surveys can easily be built into your call plan, and added to the end of a particular call queue, or just a percentage of calls using the Percentage Based Routing applet.

The surveys are built using a range of applets including:

• IVR Data Collect - callers can tap in a number to rate their experience
• IVR Audio Collect - callers can leave a recorded message about their experience
• Send Survey - the resulting score and audio can be emailed to a designated email address

Your call plan may contain a number of surveys for different types of callers - by product, or language for example. Agents can transfer callers to the relevant survey manually, or if you have a single survey the caller can be transferred automatically when the agent hangs up.

The information collected by the survey can also be accessed via an IVR Data Collector and exported to a spreadsheet to be analysed or mashed-up with other data systems. The key is to use the data to accelerate learning and amend the contact centres processes - don't collect it if you won't act on it.

Our Professional Services team says that "customer satisfaction surveys can be a great selling point for contact centres - giving a great indication of the success of the overall centre as well as individual agents."

"We recently helped a client in Ireland to implement a customer satisfaction survey which is changing the way in which their call plans work. Callers have indicated that there are too many announcements on the helpline and too many options."

We have then been able to work with the client to evolve their call plan and then monitor future surveys to observe an increase in results.

The benefit is not purely for the callers. "The feedback for the staff has been very positive and sending personalised messages (audio captured data from the IVR Collect Audio) has increased morale on the floor and encouraged a better customer service all round."

In a traditional contact centre environment the caller doesn't have the ability to give a pat on the back to an agent that has really gone above and beyond. With a customer satisfaction survey with audio they do, and this can really improve productivity for that employee and others in the team who see the effect.

Do you run customer satisfaction surveys? Do you run them on all of your calls or just a percentage? What questions would you ask on a survey?

Learn more about our Intelligent IVR and Quality Management.