Taking IVR Surveys is so Exhausting
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Taking IVR Surveys is so Exhausting
By: Marc E. Carlson, RRP
CustomerCount© Business Relationship Manager
I just got an oil change for my sedan at a franchised oil lube place. There was a toll-free phone number on the receipt to provide them feedback. Since I work in the voice of customer (VOC) world, I have a propensity to take most surveys positioned with me because I realize my feedback is useful to the servicing company to understand what I expect. I must admit, I was a little reluctant to place the call because I knew the survey would be conducted by an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. These types of surveys always exhaust me with providing a description for your scaled answer selection each and every time they ask a question. Often, I end up on the line for the first five questions and then disconnect. Who has the time to listen to the answer description for every single question? I sure don’t, and I suspect there are many others like me that get frustrated with the time commitment in providing our feedback on an IVR system.
In these busy times, I believe the best customer feedback solution from a response rate is that of an on-line solution. These types of surveys allow a consumer to provide feedback on their own time and the completion rate is much higher than surveys taken thru an IVR system. An on-line customer feedback solution will also give you better data to analyze and can capture the all important verbatim comments from the consumer. At “CustomerCount©”:http://www.customercount.com, we are firm believers in making the experience of providing customer feedback to a client easy, available when the consumer wants to provide the feedback, and builds brand affinity so the consumer purchases again, and again, and again…
Marc,
I totally agree with you that IVR surveys can be “exhausting.” We work in this industry (obviously) and have a mix of collection methodologies in play. Overwhelmingly our clients have migrated towards online collection for what I am sure are reasons you would endorse. However, the one thing I always remind our own consultants, and clients, is that their customers are not morons and actually have the capacity to 1) remember your scaling system and 2) understand the notion that one end of the scale is good and the other bad. With this, if you move away from a strict Likert scale towards a “on a scale of 1-10 where “blah” is good…” you can go a long ways towards reducing the exhaustion and getting completed surveys.