New Report: Contact Centers Fall Short on Surveys

Jeff Toister August 6, 2015

Contact centers struggle to use customer service survey data.

That's the conclusion suggested by a new report from ICMI called Collapse of the Cost Center: Driving Contact Center Profitability. The report, sponsored by Zendesk, focuses on ways that contact centers can add value to their organizations.

Collecting customer feedback is one way contact centers can add value. This feedback can be used to retain customers, improve customer satisfaction, identify product defects, and increase sales.

So, what's the struggle? Here's a statistic that immediately caught my attention:

63% of contact centers do not have a formal voice of the customer program.

Yikes! It's hard to use your contact center as a strategic listening post if you aren't listening.

Let's take a look at some of the report's findings along with some solutions.

Key Survey Stats

Here are some selected statistics from the report.

First, let's look at the types of surveys used by contact centers that do have a formal voice of the customer (VOC) program:

Customer Effort Score (CES) presents an untapped opportunity.

CES measures customers' perceived effort (see this overview). A good CES program will help companies identify things that annoy customers and create waste. This makes it a great metric for improving efficiency.

Why is efficiency so important in a customer-focused world? Here's another statistic from the ICMI report that explains it:

62% of organizations view their contact center as a cost center.

That means efficiency is one of the most important success indicators for those companies' executives. CES marries cost control and service quality by measuring efficiency from the customer's point of view.

Another revealing statistic shows what's not measured:

44% of contact centers don't measure customer retention

Keeping customers should be the name of the game for contact centers. If you don't measure this statistic, than customer retention can't be a priority.

Challenges With Surveys

The report highlighted challenges contact centers face with survey data. Here are the top five:

Challenge #1: Using survey data to improve service. Survey data is more than just a score. The key is analyzing the data to get actionable insight. That's a skill that many customer service leaders don't have. One resource is this step-by-step guide to analyzing survey data.

Challenge #2: Getting a decent response rate. Response rate is a misleading statistic. There are two things that are far more important. First, does your survey fairly represent your customer base? Second, is your survey yielding actionable data? Your response rate is irrelevant if you can confidently say "Yes" to these questions.

Challenge #3: Analyzing data. See challenge #1. You can't improve service if you don't analyze your data to determine what needs to be improved.

Challenge #4: Designing effective surveys. Survey design is another skill that many customer service leaders don't have. Here's a training video on lynda.com that provides everything you need to get started. You'll need a lynda.com account to take the full course, but you can get a 10-day trial here.

Challenge #5: Taking action to help dissatisfied customers. You'll need a closed loop survey to tackle this challenge. A closed loop survey allows customers to opt in for a follow-up contact. Once you add this, it becomes very easy to initiate a program to follow-up with upset customers.

Additional Resources

The full report provides a lot more data and advice on leveraging contact centers to improve customer service and profits. It's available for purchase on the ICMI website.

Here are some additional blog posts that can also help:

New Training Video: Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service

Jeff Toister June 16, 2015

Customer service surveys are everywhere.

Chances are, your company either uses one now or your thinking about implementing one in the near future.

So, here’s the real question: Is your survey helping you improve customer service?

Perhaps you want to improve your response rate, generate more actionable insight, or just come up with the right questions.

Or, you might be thinking about starting a customer service survey but aren’t sure how to get started.

My new course on lynda.com can help you.

It’s called Using Customer Surveys to Improve Service. This training video will walk you step-by-step through the process of implementing a customer service survey.

Topics include:

Designing impactful surveys
Writing effective survey questions
Analyzing survey results
Using data to improve customer service

You can watch a preview here.

(Side question: why does video always freeze when you're making a weird face?)

A lynda.com subscription is required to view the entire course. Fortunately, I’ve got you covered. You can drop my name and get a free 10-day trial.

Here are more customer service courses on lynda.com:

Anatomy of a Lousy Survey

Jeff Toister September 16, 2014

This blog has spent a lot of time on surveys lately.

There's a post on how to write a great survey with just three questions. There’s another post on five ways to capture VOC data without a survey. You can even read about five signs your survey may be missing the point.

This post focuses on that last topic by giving you a detailed breakdown of a lousy customer service survey from Buffalo Wild Wings.

Tip: You’ll get more survey responses if you make it easy for people to respond.

Here’s the survey invitation. There’s no QR code and the survey site itself isn’t optimized for mobile, so guests are discouraged from completing the survey on their smart phones.

Tip: Don’t bother your customer with questions you should already know the answer to.

The survey asks a lot of questions that could easily be tied to the survey code or a customized survey link. Examples include the store, date visited, and the time of day. Each of these questions are on a separate screen which makes the survey even more tedious.

So far, we're at 8 screens:

Tip: An annoyingly long survey will remind customers how annoyed they were already.

This survey is tedious! Customers don’t have the opportunity to share any feedback until they reach the 15th screen.

Tip: Cut out extra questions and give customers a comment box instead.

The survey also assumes it knows what’s driving customer dissatisfaction. The question in screen 15 (above) asks customers to provide an overall rating. The question in the screen below (screen #19 in the survey!) presumes to know what might drive customer satisfaction.

The danger is these questions might be irrelevant to the customer, but they're required to complete the survey.

Tip: Keep questions to a minimum by avoiding repetition.

By now, the questions are starting to get repetitive. Didn’t someone in marketing check this survey before giving it the green light?

Here's the question on Screen 15:

Overall, compared to your expectations of what a restaurant can and should be, how would you rate your experience at Buffalo Wild Wings?

Here's the question on Screen 26:

Compared to your expectations of what a restaurant can and should be, how would you rate the Buffalo Wild Rings you visited on providing you with the "ultimate social experience for sports fans in your community?"

Screen 26

Tip: Surveys should have a single purpose to give them razor-sharp focus.

The questions just keep coming! Buffalo Wild Wings really makes you work for that $5 coupon. Now, they want to gather some demographic data.

It looks like someone in another department said, “Hey! You’re doing a survey? Can I add a few questions?” This is the 35th screen.

The final tally on this survey was a whopping 39 screens!

The effort required to complete it is a big turnoff. Here’s an example of a survey that’s far easier to complete. It’s limited to just five questions and customers are giving two options to access the survey.

(Please excuse the blurry picture.)

Note: My personal policy is to share negative feedback privately before naming a company in a blog post. Members of my party (including me) attempted to share our feedback with the store manager but he refused to come to our table.

In this case, I'm grateful for the poor service we received since their survey provides an excellent illustrative example.

Why Your Employee Engagement Survey is a Waste of Time

Jeff Toister April 15, 2014

Let’s start with what most of us agree upon:

Employee engagement is important
Engaged employees are more productive
Engaged employees provide better customer service

The benefits are there. Unfortunately, the way most companies conduct their employee engagement survey is a waste of time.

The are five primary problems.

Problem #1: “Employee Engagement” is not defined

There’s a lot of agreement on the importance of employee engagement, but not much agreement on what “employee engagement” actually means. Even the big consulting firms like Gallup and BlessingWhite disagree.

This can spell big problems for your survey efforts.

Without a clear definition of engagement, your survey questions will be random or poorly designed. Some companies rely on the employee engagement consulting firm they’ve hired to supply the questions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those are the right questions.

If you want to measure employee engagement, start by defining it. For what it’s worth, here's my preferred definition:

Employee engagement is the extent to which employees are deliberately contributing towards organizational success.

Problem #2: Infrequent Feedback

The typical employee engagement survey is done every 12 - 18 months.

To understand how ridiculous this is, consider what would happen if you waited that long to measure anything else that was important to your business. Can you imagine...

Reviewing your financials only once per year?
Waiting 18 months to peruse your KPIs?
Asking customers for feedback only once per year?

How could you measure engagement more frequently without constantly bugging your employees? One solution is to divide your employees into 12 random groups and survey a different group once per month. This way, you get monthly feedback (just like your financial performance) while each individual employee only completes the survey once per year.

And, lest we forget, you can also try talking to employees directly.

Problem #3: The Data is Easily Manipulated

The annual engagement survey doesn’t capture a year’s worth of employee sentiment. For most employees, their most recent experiences will have a far greater impact on their survey scores than what happened six months ago.

Managers know this. Some deliberately hold morale-boosting events just before the survey goes out. Others withhold negative actions, such as employee discipline, until after the survey window is closed.

The result of a survey conducted every 12 - 18 months is skewed data. One fix is to survey random samples of the employee population more frequently (as suggested above).

Problem #4: It Feels Like a Side-Project

Many employee engagement surveys feel like a side project that distracts leaders from their real work.

It’s failure by design. Look at this typical cycle:

Employees are surveyed
Senior leaders review a results report
A blue-ribbon committee is convened to study the issue
The committee reports back to senior leaders

It's now several months after the survey. Employees are wondering if their voices were even heard. Leaders lose focus and move on to something else. The whole thing feels like a Dilbert cartoon.

Companies with highly engaged employees instill passion in their workforce through consistent, purposeful efforts. Engagement is something they do all the time, not just occasionally.

Problem #5: No Action is Taken

It all comes down to this. If you’re going to ask for your employees’ opinions, you had better do something with that information.

If not, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

5 Signs Your Customer Service Survey is Missing the Point

Jeff Toister March 18, 2014

Note: This post originally appeared on the Salesforce blog. Check out my latest post on the Salesforce blog, "Why Role Playing Doesn't Work for Customer Service Training."

Customers are getting tired of surveys. A 2010 study by Vovici revealed that Americans are inundated with over 7 billion survey requests per year. That’s nearly 23 survey requests for every American. (Ironically, I encountered a pop-up survey request when I went to the US Census Bureau website to track down that statistic.)

Many companies survey their customers, but that doesn’t mean they are doing it right. Here are five signs that a customer service survey program is missing the point.

1) Your survey has no purpose

Perhaps someone in customer service decided a survey was a good idea so they wrote a few questions. Then marketing added a few more questions. Sales chimed in with a few questions of their own. Operations got in the act too. The end result is a 100-question survey with no clear purpose.

Thinking of questions to ask your customers is the wrong place to start. Instead, think about what you specifically want to know and then design your survey to achieve that clear purpose.

Keep in mind that you may have multiple audiences. For instance, a business-to-business software company might have a transaction survey for users contacting technical support and a relationship survey for executives who make buying decisions.

2) Your survey is tiresome

The second sign of a pointless survey is it needlessly annoys customers.

For example, the dealership where I get my car serviced routinely sends me a 36 question survey after I get an oil change. That’s obnoxious.

Focus on what you really want to know and limit your questions to as few as possible. You can always use text boxes to capture additional information.

My car dealership could cut their survey from 36 questions down to 3 and still get an amazing amount of useful data:

How satisfied were you with your recent service?
(Comment box): Is there anything we can do better?
Would you like one of our service advisors to follow-up with you?

Correlating satisfaction levels with individual comments could tell the dealership what they’re doing well and what can be improved. And, asking customers if they’d like to be contacted allows service advisors to try to fix any problems that customers are venting about.

3) You’re focused on the score, not the feedback

The third sign a survey is missing the point is focusing on the score and not the feedback.

The service department at my local dealership provides a great example. All of their post-transaction follow-up focuses on cajoling me into giving them a good score on their survey. My actual feedback is irrelevant.

A sign by the cash register reminds customers they’ll be getting a survey.
Someone from the dealership calls the next day with a reminder about the survey.
The service advisor sends an email reminder a day later.

Each point of contact encourages customers to provide a top box score on the survey. At no time are customers asked about the quality of service they’ve received.

Surveys should be designed to give you feedback that you can use to improve service. Focusing on a score versus the feedback itself defeats that purpose.

4) You only look at aggregate data

The fourth sign of a pointless survey is the data isn’t analyzed. Only total scores are viewed.

Knowing what percentage of your customers are satisfied is a relatively useless statistic. There’s not much you can do with that.

It necessary to dig a little to make customer service survey data truly useful. For example, let’s say you have a 75 percent customer satisfaction rating. It takes a little bit of analysis to reveal actionable information:

Is service quality consistent amongst all employees?
What factors make it more likely for a customer to be satisfied?
What factors make it more likely for a customer to be dissatisfied?

5) You Don’t Take Any Action

The last sign of a pointless survey is the company doesn’t do anything with the data it collects.

Chip Bell, author of 9 1/2 Principles of Innovative Service, shared this startling statistic with me:

95 percent of companies survey their customers but only 10 percent actually use the feedback to take action.

It’s a waste of your customers’ time to ask them for feedback and then do nothing with it. It’s also a waste of your time too.

Smart companies use surveys as part of their continuous improvement cycle. They analyze their survey data to look for trends and pinpoint problems. This analysis leads to solutions that are implemented to improve service. Creating survey’s that generate actionable results is the key to creating a company that is constantly evolving and improving.

Want to know more?

Here are links to recordings of two of my recent webinars on making the most of customer service surveys:

How to Analyze and Act on CSAT Data

Jeff Toister March 5, 2014

You probably survey your customers.

But, do you learn anything from those surveys? More important, do you use that insight to improve service?

Chip Bell, author of 9 1/2 Principles of Innovative Service, recently shared this startling stat from a Gartner Group study:

95 percent of companies survey their customers, but only 10 percent actually use the feedback to take action.

Yikes!

Today, I hosted a webinar on analyzing and acting on customer satisfaction survey data. This post is a re-cap of the key lessons from the webinar along with some bonus information.

You can watch the webinar here.

How to Quickly Analyze Your Data

Let’s say your overall customer satisfaction is 85 percent.

By itself, the number doesn’t tell you much. The key to analyzing this data is to dig one level deeper.

For example, you could look at the distribution of survey scores by employee:

Suddenly, you see that Leo may need some extra help.

You could also look at the distribution of survey scores by the type of service request:

This reveals that product inquiries are a strength, but technical support leaves something to be desired.

If Leo gets a technical support call, you’re doomed.

Identifying Pain Points

Before you fire Leo or stop offering technical support, you may want to dig deeper still. The goal should be finding the true root cause of the problem.

One way to do this is to hone in on surveys where customers gave technical support an unsatisfactory survey score. Can you spot some themes among their comments?

Here’s an example:

It took way too long to get a simple issue resolved!
The guy didn’t seem to know what he was doing.
I got transferred twice before someone could help me.
Problem not resolved! I’ve had to call back three times.
The lady seemed confused and overwhelmed.

A theme or two emerges. The comments suggest that customers give low scores for technical support when they get the runaround or the support rep doesn’t appear to be highly competent.

Turning Insight into Action

Knowing the specific issues that annoy your customers is a good start. Now, you need to investigate to find the root cause of the problem.

In the technical support example, the best way to do this would be to spend some time with those employees. Share with them the problem you’re trying to solve. Ask a few questions. Watch them do their work.

The root cause of the problems often becomes obvious after just a few minutes of observation.

Four things might jump out if you spent some time with this technical support team:

They feel pressured to solve problems quickly to meet the department standard for Average Handle Time (AHT).
This pressure causes them to take shortcuts to maintain the AHT standard.
These shortcuts frequently lead them to transfer a call too quickly or misunderstand a customer's needs because they aren’t listening carefully.
The most inexperienced rep, Leo, has a particularly hard time with this.

Now that you know the root cause, you can take action.

Perhaps you could emphasize first contact resolution over AHT with your team. Focusing on resolving the problem makes customers happier. It also reduces callbacks, which in turn reduces overall call volume.

And, focusing on first contact resolution doesn't necessarily cause a spike in AHT.

You may also want to check in with Leo to make sure he doesn’t get lost on the learning curve.

Revisit Your Surveys

The final step in the process is to revisit your survey. You want to see if the actions you’ve taken have actually increased customer satisfaction.

You’ll be realizing the true value of a customer service survey when you follow these steps on a regular basis. Service will improve and your customers will be happier.

Why You Should Stop Trying to Improve Your Survey Scores

Jeff Toister February 27, 2014

There’s a lot of pressure these days to improve customer service survey scores.

Executives review the scores on a regular basis. Business units are compared to one another. Employees are held accountable for their scores. Rewards are given for outstanding results. Low scores bring about consequences.

If this is your company’s focus, you’re wasting your time.

Getting fixated on a number can bring about all sorts of unwelcome behaviors. I recently overheard a coffee shop barista pleading with a customer to give them a great score. “We are sooooooooo graded on this!”

Never mind that the barista’s groveling turned an otherwise pleasant interaction into an awkward moment for the customer and everyone else in the store.

Sometimes, enterprising store managers take it upon themselves to have their employees nudge customers in the right direction. I recently received a survey invitation while shopping at Sports Authority. The cashier stamped the expected answer on the invitation.

Gee, thanks.

Sadly, this isn’t an isolated incident. Auto dealerships are notorious for this type of obnoxious behavior where they relentlessly pester customers to give them a great survey score. All the while, any actual feedback is ignored.

What if you don’t engage in manipulative tactics?

Focusing on the score is still missing the point. The score, by itself, doesn’t tell you anything. It certainly doesn’t help you do anything differently.

A score is nothing but an average. It’s an aggregate representation of many individual experiences. Focusing on the score might even hide service failures so long as the average looks good.

Think of it this way: your 85 percent satisfaction score won’t help the individual customer who is currently receiving poor service.

What you should focus on instead

Companies that truly care about customer service focus on continuous improvement.

The customer service survey can be a valuable tool in this quest. Used correctly, it provides valuable insight into what your customers want you to do better. This insight should lead to action that will improve service.

Better service, not better a better score, is the obsession.

Making sense of survey data can be tough. Companies can have a hard time culling insights from reams of data and turning those insights into action. That’s why I’m hosting a webinar on Wednesday, March 5 from 10-11am (Pacific) called How to Analyze and Act on Customer Service Survey Data.

The goal is to show you how to quickly use this data to continuously improve service. I hope you can attend.

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The Killer Three Question Customer Service Survey

Jeff Toister February 20, 2014

“Surveys are too long.”

That’s one of the biggest reasons why customers don’t complete satisfaction surveys. Their time is valuable. Take 100 questions to ask about their experience and people get annoyed.

There’s another problem with long surveys.

Companies don’t know what to do with all that data. There’s just too much of it. So they do nothing. The result is customers were needlessly bothered with 100 irrelevant questions.

I'm pretty sure the term "analysis paralysis" came from a customer service survey.

There is a simpler way. You can design an extremely useful customer service survey with just three questions.

The wording of the questions themselves varies, but the three basic types of questions remain the same:

What is your overall rating?
Please tell us more. (Open comments)
May we follow-up?

The three questions survey ditches the endless stream of useless questions for three insanely useful ones. Let's break it down:

Question 1: Overall Rating

The first question asks your customer to give your company, product, or service an overall rating. The rating can be converted into a score that makes it easy to report.

The specific question you ask should be determined by your survey’s purpose. A good survey always starts with a clear objective. You can read more about that here.

Here’s an example:

A survey score by itself doesn’t do much good. That’s because it doesn’t tell you what you need to do to make service even better. We’ll need another question to learn that.

Question 2: Please Tell Us More

The second question asks your customers to provide some more information about the answer they gave to question one. This is a free-form comment box that allows them to write whatever they’d like.

These comments are a bit more helpful than a numerical score. Customers are using this box to tell you exactly what they are thinking. Some times, they’ll point out some known issues. Other times, they’ll mention something you hadn’t even considered.

The real magic happens when you combine the results of questions 1 and 2. For example, you might look for themes among customer comments when they provide a high rating versus a low rating. Here’s a sample:

Question 3: Follow-up

Hopefully, customers will use the comment section of your survey to tell you how much they love your company.

What do you do if a customer shares some negative feedback?

That’s where the third question comes in. It asks customers for their permission to be contacted if you have any additional questions. A customer who answers “yes” is giving you an invitation to close the loop.

Two caveats here.

First - you aren’t obligated to contact the customer if you word the question like the example above. It’s generally a good idea to close the loop when customers answer “yes” to this question, even when the feedback is positive. However, you want to preserve some flexibility in the event you get overwhelmed with responses and can’t follow-up with everyone.

Second - you must actually capture the customer’s contact information.

Putting it into Action

I’m in no way implying that all customer service surveys must have three, and only three questions. Rather, I’m challenging you to think twice before making your survey any longer.

And, no matter what questions you ask, you still need to do something with that data.

Developing Effective Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Jeff Toister February 14, 2014

This post is a short re-cap of the Designing Effective Customer Satisfaction Surveys webinar.

It was designed to be an overview of the basics. There are also links to additional resources at the bottom of this post so you can take a deeper dive into the subject.

You can view the webinar here.

The webinar focused on three key points:

Impactful survey design
Fast survey creation
Response rate strategies

This was a very interactive webinar and a lot of participants contributed some terrific ideas. One of my favorites was our brief discussion on why we don’t complete surveys ourselves. You can learn a lot about why your customers won’t do something if you examine why you yourself won’t do it.

The webinar runtime is approximately 48 minutes and is definitely worth viewing.

Don’t Miss Part 2!

Surveying your customers is just the first step. Next, you must use that data to take action! I’m hosting a follow-up webinar on Wednesday, March 5 at 10am PST. It's called How to Analyze and Act on Customer Satisfaction Data.

You can use the form below to register.

Event Registration Online for How to Analyze and Act on Customer Satisfaction Data powered by Eventbrite

Additional Resources

Here are links to some blog posts and articles to help you take a deeper dive into creating effective customer satisfaction surveys.

Three Roadblocks to Effective Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Jeff Toister January 21, 2014

How would you rate your customer service survey?

Customer service surveys are everywhere.

A 2010 study by Vovici revealed that Americans are inundated with over 7 billion survey requests per year. That’s nearly 23 survey requests for every American.

The intent of these surveys is to capture Voice of the Customer (VOC) information that can be used to improve service. Unfortunately, that intent is rarely realized. Some surveys are poorly designed. Others have low response rates.The worst problem is not doing anything with the data collected.

This is a common theme among the small and medium sized business I work with. Most have some sort of survey program in place but there’s a nagging feeling that it's not very useful.

Perhaps your company is considering a customer service survey. Or, you have one already but now you’d like to make the most of it. Here are three common roadblocks you’ll need to avoid:

#1 Inertia

Many customer service professionals believe that a robust VOC program is important but they just don’t know how to get started. Inertia sets in. Do any of these excuses sound familiar?

I don’t have time right now.
It’s too expensive.
Our customers are tired of surveys.
It’s just a number that senior management wants to see.
Surveys don’t really apply to us.

Nothing changes without action. Companies who delay implementing a VOC program could be missing out on a gold mine of information. Even worse, they might continue to run an ineffective program that wastes everyone’s time, including their customers'.

#2 Poor design

Customer service surveys are often little more than a pile of questions that reveal little or no insight. The surveys become longer and longer as each stakeholder thinks of things they’d like to ask. A simple transaction survey soon becomes 100 questions long.

The net result is the survey annoys the customer while the company is left with piles of data they don’t know how to use.

#3 Low response rates

Poorly designed and executed survey programs often yield low response rates. It can be disheartening to go through the trouble of creating a survey and then have hardly anyone respond. Continuing the program can be difficult to justify if customers aren’t responding.

Solutions

I’m offering a complimentary webinar to help you avoid these roadblocks.

Designing Effective Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Date: Thursday, February 13
Time: 10 am - 11 am (PST)

You’ll learn:

Simple ways to quickly create surveys on a tight budget
Proven techniques for writing impactful survey questions
Three secrets to improving your response rates

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This is the first of a two-part webinar series that covers the basics of customer service surveys. The second webinar, called How to Analyze and Act on Customer Satisfaction Data, will be held on March 5.