Struggling with your customer feedback survey? Try this instead

Are your survey response rates way, way down? Do you struggle to find out what your customers actually think about your product or service? If your insights feel empty and you’re starting to feel more and more disconnected from your customers, you’re not alone. Fortunately, the customer feedback survey has seen some significant improvements in recent years, thanks to innovations in Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics. Access to call data makes it possible to create better customer experiences based on real insights from real customer calls. 

Here are three reasons to level-up your customer feedback survey with a VoC analytics solution:

Improve sample size

The traditional customer feedback survey is inherently limited by the need to coax customers into taking time out of their busy schedules to click on your link. Customers are experiencing severe survey fatigue, and aren’t interested in filling out all the surveys you’d need to get an accurate picture of what does and doesn’t need to change in the business. 

A VoC solution neatly solves for this problem by recording and analyzing data on every single phone call, boosting your sample size up to 100%. You can now pick and choose when to seek out very specific information on your far-less-frequent surveys, making your customers feel like they’re contributing. At the same time, you’re still getting insights out of every single call, chat, and case interaction. It’s the best of both worlds!

Avoid bias

There’s always been bias in post-call customer feedback surveys, and we’ve always had to work around that. We knew unhappy customers were more likely to fill out the surveys, so it was hard to get an idea of who was happy at the end of the call, and why. Those days are over with VoC analytics. Now, every customer has “opted in” by picking up the phone to contact you in the first place. You get data on every single call without bias. 

Get action items

One of our favorite innovations here at Tethr is the ability to create action items out of call data. A customer feedback survey often just gives you a score from 1-10 or a red, yellow, or green smiley face. It doesn’t tell you anything about what went wrong or what you can do to prevent it from happening again. Our conversation analytics platform and proprietary effort score, the Tethr Effort Index (TEI), can do just that. You’ll be able to quickly identify gaps in service and immediately take away action items to address them.

Now, we’re not saying that the customer feedback survey doesn’t have a place in the future of customer listening. In fact, several of our partners do a really great job pairing Tethr’s conversation analysis with post-call surveys in order to arrive at a more complete picture of the customer experience. We do think, however, that how we rely on the survey needs to grow and change. And if you’re looking to augment the survey, investing in a strong conversation analytics platform (like Tethr!) is a surefire way to better connect to your customers and improve CX. 

Want to learn more about how Tethr stacks up against the traditional post-call survey? Check out our breakdown of the Tethr Effort Index in this comprehensive whitepaper.