When to Collect Feedback from Your Customers

Any contact center that is committed to enhancing their customer experience (CX) and product or service offering relies on voice of the customer (VoC) feedback as an essential input to identifying challenges and subsequently prioritizing future improvements.

As the saying goes, timing is everything and this holds especially true for collecting valuable VoC insights. Choosing the correct timing improves survey participation rates, and results in gathering more relevant and high-quality feedback, based on the customer’s most recent interactions with the business.

Send early

It is recommended that VoC surveys should be sent as soon as possible after the customer has engaged with your business. This approach encourages more prompt and honest feedback which is directly relevant to the service they have just received. Consequently, the following question arises: how often should they be sent?

Send frequently

To get more people to respond to your surveys, it's a good idea to keep them short, simple, and frequent. The more often you do surveys that are easy to understand and quick to complete, the better your participation rates will be. Remember, your previous surveys also affect how customers will perceive the next. So, if your past surveys were interesting and got people involved, that will encourage them to take part again and share their thoughts, but if they had a negative experience, the opposite is also true.

Keep them brief

Typically, a combination of up to three metric-based queries and one or two open-ended questions should be sufficient. Going beyond this is likely to result in a significant drop in response rates. Keep your surveys brief, easy to understand and relevant to exactly what information you better need to understand. This will ensure you achieve valuable and deep insights into the particular area you are interested in, rather than more broad, generic answers.

Strike while the iron’s hot

You should always aim to collect customer feedback as close to the interaction event as possible. When it comes to surveys, time is of the essence. According to best practices, your surveys should:

• Be an integral part of your business’s standard operational processes
• Be seamlessly incorporated with the respective interaction itself
• Be presented to the customer on the channel they are already interacting with
  
  

By incorporating this feedback request into the normal course of their interaction with your business, customers are going to be much more inclined to provide the desired information. This approach has repeatedly been proven to significantly increase survey participation rates. 

Think of the short IVR surveys you may have completed at the close of a call, or web surveys you participated in following a webchat. Through these automatic VoC requests, your customer can provide you with relevant, quick and easy responses and then immediately move on to their next task.

The value of automation

With constant interactions occurring across your contact center, automation of your VoC feedback collection and analysis processes becomes a necessity, especially if you truly want to understand what your customers see, think and feel about their experiences.

Cyara CentraCX is a cloud-based, real-time customer feedback management solution that enables contact centers like yours to proactively, quickly and easily gather and understand the VoC across all of your engagement channels.

CentraCX automatically sends the surveys to your customers based on your prespecified trigger points and then collects and organizes the data, making it easily shareable with contact center leaders and agents. Through greater insights, your team and you can then take any actions necessary to achieve a better CX and improved business outcomes.