On my daily browse of the New York Times, I ran across an article listing the biggest pet peeves for consumers. I had a sneaking suspicion that customer service would make it on this list, and as the title of this post infers, we did. The comment on the service experience went as follows:
ENOUGH AFTER-CALL SURVEYS!
“You call, say, an airline for a reservation, and after navigating the monkey bars that stand between you and a human being, a recording asks if you can stay on the line once the call is completed and take a brief survey about the experience. The answer is no. If the point is for Company X to improve its customer rep system, it is probably recording and “monitoring” those conversations, as we are often reminded by the same automated voice. So the company should eavesdrop on its own time without asking to take up any more of ours.”
The experience described above represents an unfortunate, but common, sentiment that could be dismissed as simply a rant. But, what I find interesting about the complaint above is it shows how customers don’t always appreciate the different purposes and value between the IVR for routing vs. the IVR for surveys. Of course, we know the importance of and difference between the two. IVR routing can either help a customer self-serve or get them to the appropriate rep, while IVR surveys are key to uncover cusotmer feedback for improvement areas beyond what internal monitoring can identify. It’s not like either of these tasks are put in place simply to irritate customers, they both serve important purposes for both the customer and the company.
It’s important, then, for us to make this trasparently obvious to the customer, because it’s all the same in their minds. Here’s a couple of tips to breach this disconnect between customer viewpoint and company opinion of the IVR:
1. Make Your IVR Less Painful – Taken from Lauren’s earlier post, “the two statistically significant drivers of customers experience related to the IVR are speed and ease of use. Customers are saying to you, ‘make it quick and painless, please!’ Just like our work on customer effort in the live phone channel – eliminating unnecessary effort is the key.” Check out Lauren’s post for more tips on simplying your IVR routing.
2. Clearly Define Purpose of Surveys – Part of the frustration in the above example is simply from being asked to take a post-call survey, especially if the customer isn’t sure how (of even if) their feedback will be used. A couple of ideas to mitigate this frustration:
- Always ask yourself: do we do anything with this customer feedback or is it just a big stockpile of data? Make sure you have a tangible use for all of the data, and if not, consider shortening your survey to make it faster for the customer to complete. Asking 5 questions you can take action on is better than asking 20 more questions that don’t provide much additional insight.
- Make sure to position surveys as genuinely beneficial to the customer. As an example, one financial services company clearly states their feedback requests as a learning exercise: “We’re trying to learn more about how our customers prefer to resolve issues…”
So while the press may be giving customer service a bad rep (pun intended), I think this is a great opportunity to think about the experience from the customer’s point of view and work to bridge the gap between the customer and company. What have been your experiences in mitigating customer complaints about your IVR?
CCC members, check out our futher work on customer effort that was mentioned in the post, or see how Fidelity positions post-call surveys as learning mechanisms.
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