5 Things Customers Hate About Your Contact Centre Surveys

Getting useful feedback from your customers is absolutely essential when you want to improve the performance of your agents. This is why call centre customer survey and insight solutions are so important to the overall customer experience.

As customers, we find ourselves inundated with surveys every week. And as a survey and insight expert, I am often compelled to complete surveys to help call centres improve their operation.

Call centre survey and insight blunders

Unfortunately, the majority of surveys we receive contain several survey faux pas. After twenty years of capturing insight for some of the UK’s most loved brands, I know that a poor survey always results in poor insight – adding very little value to any call centre improvement processes.

In order to really understand where call centre survey and insight initiatives are going awry, let’s take a look at exactly which elements of surveys are causing customers unbridled frustration.

Mandatory questions

Not being able to skip a particular question that might not be applicable is truly annoying. Forcing your customer to answer questions they may not want to or can’t answer is a surefire way to incite frustration.

This demonstrates you’d rather get no feedback at all than a survey with incomplete data – leading to reduced response rates, abandoned surveys and a disgruntled customer. Use a ‘rather not say’ option, or reword questions to become more succinct to avoid this faux pas.

Asking what you should already know

It’s not uncommon for companies to prompt customers to participate in a web survey via email, but quite astoundingly, more than a few of these surveys will ask the customer for their email address.

This is problematic for the customer as they can clearly see little logic or rationality in the process, which is more than likely interpreted as a flagrant disregard for their time, and a lack of efficiency on your part. Make sure you’re not asking for information that you can automatically pull from your systems with the right call centre survey and insight solution.

Fixed ‘yes or no’ response options

Keeping it simple is a great way to maximise response rates. However, some of the information you want to provide as a customer doesn’t fit neatly into a ‘yes or no’ answer. For example:

‘Did you enjoy your experience with us today?’

This kind of question can lead to frustration if customers feel there is no opportunity to provide detail which they consider to be important. This approach also provides little true insight, as it doesn’t reveal exactly which element of the interaction being surveyed was enjoyable or not. Instead, try to provide the customer with a range of responses where possible.

A lack of response options

One seemingly sound rationale might be that open questions create rich and qualitative responses. However, customers feel they shouldn’t be tasked with having to ‘dig deep’ and craft meaningful answers for you – you should be eliciting them. Make sure your questions are specific enough to require answers that aren’t too taxing to compose.

A billion questions

It’s understandable to want to get the most out of each survey your customers agree to complete, but many call centres put their customer experience in jeopardy by creating a survey that is too long.

A drearily long survey encourages the customer to sprint through responses and get it over with as quickly as possible. Limit your surveys to no more than ten questions, even less.

All being said, we know it’s not easy to capture feedback in the call centre that can be transformed into actionable insight. Find out how you can start truly understanding what customers think and feel about your call centre.