Customer feedback is crucial to building a successful company. Without knowing the voice of your customer, your company will never learn and grow to accommodate consumers’ needs. One great way to get customer feedback is through surveys, but as an article by Bob Hayes points out, sometimes surveys can be too long to be effective. Hayes reports on his study of utilizing one long customer survey versus a survey with only two open-ended questions. His discovery was that a two-question survey provided as much information as a thirteen-question survey regarding customers’ satisfaction, the context of satisfaction, and key drivers.
Because of these findings, companies should consider using shorter surveys with open-ended questions if they want to gain maximum results while saving time, money, and effort. Not only will your customers feel more inclined to respond if they feel they don’t have to put too much work into it, but your company will also benefit financially due to less work and time being required to create and analyze the survey.
2 Ways Contact Centers Can Avoid Overwhelming Customers
If there’s one thing to learn from many customer service interactions, it’s that piling on while a customer is already overwhelmed will only create more frustration or anger. This is unhealthy for both agent and customer, and it should be avoided as much as possible. The more harmonious of an interaction it is, the more likely a person will be to be a repeat customer. The following are two pieces of advice for how contact centers can avoid overwhelming their customers:
- Don’t equivocate or complicate: If a customer calls in with a very specific issue, then address it and solve it without dancing around the question or adding extra information on top of it. For example, if a person is stressed about a product not working and they want their money back, then jump straight to telling them how they can get a refund without telling them all the unnecessary details about how the returns process works. In the customer’s mind, the solution is very simple, “Can you give me a refund and when?” If they need more information, they’ll ask for it. Obviously, this isn’t always possible with certain company policies, but its best to avoid information overload if policies allow it.
- Sometimes avoid the sales pitch: Agents often have quotas or sales goals they need to achieve for their KPIs. It’s the nature of the business and can’t be ignored. However, there are circumstances where the sales pitch just might need to be tossed aside. If a customer has been sent through the ringer and put on hold and transferred multiple times, they’re angry and not in the mood for the typical protocol. If an agent senses that their customer is furious, they should be allowed to skip the up-sell or cross-sell portion of the call. The customer most likely won’t be open to it anyway and it’ll spare both parties from unnecessary escalation.
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click here: Are You Asking Customers Too Many Questions? Try Just Two – Bob Hayes
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