What’s the “best” way to survey customers after a service call?
Two popular methods are by IVR and email. The blog post “Post Call IVR Surveys: Popular But Not That Useful” contains interesting analysis of the merits of these techniques.
At ServeMeBest, we agree that requesting feedback by email is better than via IVR for the reasons described by the author.
But we believe there is a third variation that’s better than both: using SMS and the mobile web. This method has all the advantages of email, plus some more benefits:
- Customers are more likely to read and act on SMS messages. With email, the invitation can be lost in the crowd, filtered to the spam folder, or simply deleted unread.
- Many customers will read email on their mobiles, but not all. All customers can receive and read SMS invitations.
- Sending invitations to mobile is more personal means of communication than email, with higher sense of urgency and importance.
- For data capture, it is much easier for an agent to accurately record a mobile number than an email.
- Using SMS is a good fit for businesses that are developing a strategy of mobile communications and app usage.
Survey+: Flexible, instant feedback by mobile
ServeMeBest’s mobile survey product, Survey+, is designed to request mobile surveys after any customer contact.
Mobile number capture
We agree that it makes sense to collect and store contact information for customers, so they can be surveyed. Many businesses routinely collect customer mobile numbers – along with permission to contact them by SMS. If the mobile number is not already captured, Survey+ includes an optional IVR module to request and capture the number. If the caller is calling from a mobile, the number can usually be captured automatically via Caller ID. In other cases, the caller is prompted to enter their number on the keypad.
Armed with the mobile number, Survey+ is ready to use for single ad-hoc surveys, or bulk surveys by file upload or API.
A powerful API
Survey+ has a defined request API, which is the recommended way to use the product. It means a particular survey can be requested depending on the touchpoint or type of contact (pre-sales, post-sales etc). The request can be made at any time – immediately after a contact, or at a particular time later.
No gaming of surveys
As it uses an API, Survey+ survey requests can be triggered by a ruleset, with no input from the operator, thus avoiding gaming of results. Survey+ has its own rulesets, to control repeat surveys, and prevent repeat completion of surveys by the same user. These serve to not only reduce survey fatigue, but increase the quality of the dataset.
Active Customer Tagging by default
Gathering data by voice is problematic when it comes to analysis. Survey+ survey data is well defined and tagged, so easy to process. Each survey is sent using a unique URL, so the response can be tracked. The dataset can be linked not just to a particular customer, but to a particular customer contact, using a unique identifier.
Completing the feedback loop
Uniquely, Survey+ data can be fed back live to a CRM system, for instant viability and action. As soon as a customer clicks “submit”, the survey dataset can be sent back to an API, along with identification data such as customer ID and incident ID.
Tweaking the survey content
Survey+ surveys can be configured via a browser based UI. Thus there are no costs involved if questions need to be tweaked, or graphics and logos require adjustment.
A cloud service
The standard Survey+ deployment is cloud based, offering rapid and cost effective deployment at any scale.