IVR (interactive voice response) phone surveys are a popular and useful way for businesses and organizations to gather relevant data and gain new insights into their audiences. However, callers don’t exactly line up down the block to complete them.
There are endless reasons why a typical caller may not finish a survey, but here are six big ones:
- It provides too many answers to choose from
- There’s only one way to submit answers
- The survey doesn’t respect the customer’s time
- There’s a lack of relevancy
- It asks the same old questions
- The surveyor fails to follow up
For businesses that struggle with uncompleted surveys, the good news is that many of these problems can be addressed with quick fixes. In particular, by adhering to some best practices of IVR surveys, such as keeping your answer options brief and concise, staying on topic, and offering multiple ways to provide answers, they should be able to get a lot more finished surveys in the bag.
In any case, the road to reaping the benefits of a higher IVR survey response rate starts by taking a closer look at what they’re like from the caller’s perspective—and it ends by knowing what to do with the data after collecting it.
IVR Surveys: Should You Even Bother?
While it may seem frustrating to deal with the low response rates that often accompany IVR surveys, the fact of the matter is that everybody has to start somewhere. At the same time, there’s no denying that the responses and results of these surveys can offer many benefits for businesses and organizations who manage to obtain them.
The reasons that make IVR surveys worthwhile include the following:
Gather insights about your customers
First and foremost, IVR surveys are a great way to gather constructive criticism in the form of customer feedback. By directly asking your customers how they feel about your IVR system and their overall customer service experience, you can collect practical information that your company can use to improve its customer satisfaction rates and make customer journeys more helpful.
Quick and easy setup
Setting up an IVR survey is generally pretty quick and easy to do, especially with today’s best Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Once it’s complete, you’ll be able to collect large amounts of useful data about your audience and how they feel about your customer service almost immediately.
Greater customer engagement
Implementing an IVR survey can be a simple and effective way to boost customer engagement and interactivity. By asking for customer participation, you can eventually use their contributions to respond better to future customer needs, increase conversions, and send a message that you truly care about the experiences that your customers have when they call your company.
Low-cost
IVR surveys are reasonably affordable to implement. Yes, it costs time and money to transcribe, code, and analyze survey answer data, but the overall benefits can easily outweigh the costs for most businesses and organizations.
Simple and fast for customers to complete
Compared with many other types of surveys, IVR surveys are not as complicated or as taxing on the customers. With just a few questions on a call that was already taking place, you can collect quality data regarding your customer service practices with minimal technical issues.
What (Most) IVR Surveys Are Like From the Caller’s Perspective
Many companies conduct IVR surveys that are designed poorly enough to become an inconvenience to callers on the other end of the line. As a result, these companies suffer from lower survey response rates than they otherwise would expect. Once again, there are six big things that they might be doing wrong, which ultimately sends callers running for the hills.
1. Providing too many answer options
Survey respondents can feel overwhelmed when there are too many answers to choose from, which often causes them to leave or give answers they don’t really mean. This is already a bad practice due to either of those results as it is, but it can also make it harder to collect and evaluate your data effectively—both if there are too many answers for your data to be meaningful and if there are a ton of unreliable answers.
For example, rating your customer service on a scale of 1-10 is already a bit too specific to be useful (because what’s the practical difference between, say, 3 and 4?), but it becomes even less useful if you can’t tell which answers were serious and which ones were not.
2. Offering only one way to provide answers
When giving options to provide answers, always offer both touch-tone and voice options. Some customers may not feel comfortable or know how to do just one, leading to a higher abandonment rate. It’s also a good idea to allow customers to leave an open-ended response for whatever feedback they decide to give.
3. Not respecting the customer’s time
Asking too many questions and not being upfront about the number of questions and topics your survey has—or the estimated time it’ll take to complete—can frustrate respondents and send a message that you don’t respect their time. This, in turn, will lead to lower response rates in many cases.
4. Lack of relevancy
When designing your survey, make sure the questions you ask are relevant to the IVR customer experience and/or their experience with your customer service. Asking off-topic questions, such as if the respondent is aware of an upcoming sale or the last time they visited your website, can be very off-putting and harm your brand and customer service reputation.
5. Not alerting callers to a post-call survey
Not notifying callers of your post-call survey before it starts can be jarring to many of them, making them feel as if they’re being ambushed or pressured into doing something they didn’t anticipate. This can damage your brand’s reputation and cause many of your customers to avoid contacting your call center for the information they need in the future, ultimately lowering customer engagement and satisfaction.
6. Failing to follow up
In many cases, customers who give their honest feedback about a negative customer experience with an IVR system never receive a follow-up or acknowledgment from the business or organization. This creates a negative perception that their opinions and experiences don’t matter to you, decreasing their likelihood of participating in future surveys.
7 Ways to Get Your IVR Survey Completed
1. Introduce the precise topic of the survey beforehand
Always let the caller know that there will be a survey after the call and tell them exactly what kind of topics they’ll be asked about. This way, you can greatly reduce abandonments that happen due to fear of the unknown.
2. The topic must be relevant to the call
Keep your IVR survey topics relevant to the call. By doing so, you can gauge how your IVR system is working and gather relevant, useful data on how to improve the customer service experience that comes with it.
3. Upgrade your call center software
Upgrading your contact center platforms by using cutting-edge software like RingCentral, Aircall, and Nextiva (our personal favorite) is an effective way to get the most out of your surveys. Not only will it be easier to design, build, and implement your IVR surveys from day one, but it’ll also be easier to analyze the data you gather from them.
Additionally, you may also want to leverage advanced cloud and speech recognition technology that enhances productivity via personalized messaging, faster survey speed, automated data collection, and integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) software.
4. Keep things simple and concise
When designing your IVR survey, minimize the number of questions you ask and the number of available options for answering each question. By keeping your survey simple, you can send a message that you respect the time of your respondents, and you can collect data that you’ll actually be able to put to good use.
5. Have clear goals in mind
When designing your survey, start off with a clear objective. You can figure out your goals by asking yourself a few questions.
Do you want to gather actionable insights on how to improve your IVR phone system? Do you want to gauge how your live agents are doing? Do you want to discover small changes that could make your overall customer service better?
By focusing on a few clear goals right away, you can design a more intuitive, focused, and relevant survey that callers won’t mind completing.
6. Know your audience
Consider implementing several versions of your survey based on your audience.
For example, you may want a different version of your survey for customers who called to get a specific piece of information, customers who called multiple times, and customers who used various methods to contact you. By tailoring the survey experience, you can increase your response rate and make sure the data you collect is especially relevant and useful.
7. Test your survey
Finally, always test your survey before blasting it out into the world. This is an important step that can help you remove unnecessary questions, identify technical issues, and fix any logical missteps so you can ensure that it’s as polished and intuitive as possible before it reaches all of your customers.
Best Practices for Designing a Useful IVR Survey
When designing an IVR survey, keep the following rules of thumb in mind to optimize both your response rate and your survey’s overall effectiveness.
- Do a soft launch: Before rolling out your IVR survey to all of your customers, it’s generally a good idea to do a soft launch with a small test group to identify any technical issues, optimize the customer journey, and ensure that the survey operates smoothly.
- Get to the point: Remember to keep your survey brief, streamlined, and logical to improve your response rate.
- Make sure your callers get the help they need first: Always make sure that your callers get the information they need or are able to speak with a live agent before taking your survey to ensure that your survey isn’t an annoying roadblock.
- Be honest with your callers: Inform your survey takers of how many questions will be asked beforehand and try to avoid ones that start with “should,” “could,” or “would” to make sure the phrasing is as neutral as possible.
- Don’t be afraid to make some changes: If your response rate is perpetually low, take a whack at optimizing your survey by changing the number of questions, how the questions are phrased, and how many answer options are available.
IVR Survey Data: What to Do Next?
Gathering customer data via an IVR survey is great if you can do it successfully, but that’s only half the battle. Your next steps should be to transcribe, code, and analyze the data to identify what’s working well for your business and what areas need to be improved.
For example, if a sizeable chunk of respondents said that they felt like it took too long for them to reach a live agent after navigating your IVR, make some changes to your IVR and then update your survey to ask callers how they feel about the length of time it takes to get to an agent. By taking customer feedback to heart and implementing actionable changes based on it, you can significantly improve your customer experience.
Optimize Your IVR Survey for Success
Designing an effective IVR survey can be tricky and time-consuming, but the answers they provide can return immense value. At the end of the day, if you can understand how to get more callers to answer your questions, you’ll be a lot closer to having a wealth of data that you can use to improve your business practices.
Remember to take advantage of the advanced IVR features of today’s best call center services, as these can speed up and enhance the creation, implementation, and analysis of all your surveys.