If you are passionate about excellent customer service you need to encourage customer feedback and actively listen for opportunities to improve your business. One method commonly used to gain feedback is sending your customers satisfaction surveys following an interaction with your customer service team.
Structuring Voice Of Customer Surveys: Questions And Comments
Begin by asking simple questions that reflect your service goals. If you are looking for feedback about your customer service agents’ performances, ask customers to rate how satisfied they were in regards to:
- How long it took for the call to be answered by a live agent
- The agent’s professionalism
- The agent’s understanding of the issue
- The agent’s ability to resolve the issue
- Overall quality of the interaction
Or, you may want to focus your questions on a customer’s experience with your product and how likely they are to recommend it to others.
Adjust these questions as you see fit, but it is vital that you do not limit your customers’ insight to the questions you are interested in. Your customer has a unique perspective about your business, especially the customers who are calling your customer service department. Therefore, it is important to provide a space at the end of every survey for people to express their opinion in their own words.
Benefits of Verbatim Customer Comments
Imagine that you do not include a space for verbatim comments in your survey and the results from the respondents indicate that 90% of your customers are satisfied with their interactions with your customer service department. You might conclude, “Well, the vast majority of our customers are satisfied. Since you can’t please all the people all the time, we must being doing a great job and there is no room for improvement.”
Now, would this assessment be productive? Of course not! Always look for ways to improve your service, but understand that satisfaction rates alone cannot provide a complete road-map to improvement.
Let’s say that all of your unsatisfied customers experienced the same error using one of your products. If different agents are handling each case separately, they may be resolving the issue for each individual, but your organization as a whole will not have the awareness to attack the problem at its root. By including a space for verbatim comments on your satisfaction survey, the difficulty comes to light and offers you the opportunity to solve the problem.
The verbatim comments section isn’t only for your unsatisfied customers. You will be amazed at the appreciation that customers show when you delight them. Share the wonderful things that satisfied customers are saying with your entire organization, especially your customer service team. It’s an easy way to boost morale and provide recognition of a job well done.
Follow Up
You have to make sure to follow up with any unsatisfied customers. Whether you are providing a solution or informing them that you are still working to resolve the issue, you can make an enormous impression on your customer simply by letting them know that you appreciate their perspective. It validates their concern and builds a relationship of trust and loyalty.
Keeping your unsatisfied customers in the loop also helps you manage your online reputation. The graph to the side indicates that customers are not silent about their experiences. But a customer might be less likely to express their frustration through the various social media channels if they know your business has heard their voice. Following up with your unsatisfied customer may even turn that negative complaint into a glowing review.
Keystone
Gain customer loyalty, drive internal improvements, and manage your reputation by giving customers an opportunity to express themselves freely in satisfaction surveys.
Please share your experiences in using customer feedback to drive business improvements. We would love to hear from you!
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