If you want to solicit feedback from your customers about the service you offer, you need to ensure that the feedback is balanced and impartial. You may, however, face the problem of agents cherry-picking happy customers as they are not keen to transfer dissatisfied customers. Opinion-8 offers three possible solutions to this potential problem:

• Enhanced agent selection: The Opinion-8 system selects callers to whom the agent should offer a survey, either randomly or by certain criteria.
• Stealth mode: Callers to your company are asked by recorded message whether they would like to participate in a survey at the end of their calls. Those who elect to do so, press a specified key on their telephones. Once the participant’s conversation with the agent is finished, the call is automatically routed to Opinion-8’s survey system.
• Call-back: This method allows callers to request a call back so that they can participate in a survey. The call-back can be either automated or carried out by the agent. With automated call-back, the callers are asked by an automated system (before being connected to the agent) whether they would mind being called back after their call to participate in a customer satisfaction survey. The Opinion-8 server then immediately calls the customer back with the automated survey. With agent-assisted call-back, another agent calls the customer back immediately after the end of their call.

Considerations

These three methods are not mutually exclusive and can be used in tandem. Which of these methods or which combination of methods is best for you depends on a number of factors:

• The proportion of callers you would like to survey
• Whether you want the agent to introduce the survey to the caller
• Whether you want the agent to know whether the caller has been or will be asked to participate in a survey
• Whether you would like Opinion-8 to record the call as well as record the comments the caller had about the call
• Whether your call centre has a desktop application that helps the agent handle calls
• Whether your call centre has IVR capability
• Whether you would prefer that customers participate in a survey at the end of the same call as their interaction with the call centre, or that they be called back by Opinion-8 shortly (in most cases immediately) after the call with the call centre has terminated.

Having an idea of the answer to the above points will help determine the best ways of using Opinion-8 in your call centre. Whatever method you choose, it is possible to connect call centre information, such as the ID of the agent who handled the call, with the questionnaire answered by the caller. There are a number of ways of connecting call centre data to Opinion-8. To decide the best way of doing so we suggest you contact us to discuss your needs.

Call centres have high levels of staff turnover, amongst the highest of any industry sector. As the average cost for replacing staff is estimated by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development as up to £9,000, it is fundamental to the success of any organisation to retain its best employees.

Responding to your employees’ needs not only increases employee engagement and improves employee retention, but also promotes customer satisfaction, which is consistently reported as one of the most important issues for contact centres.

What’s going wrong?

Managers face competing demands to improve customer service and to streamline the efficiency of their call centre’s service levels. This can often make employees feel pressurised and scrutinised and can actually prevent them from fully satisfying the demands of their customers.

Call centre and customer contact staff have traditionally assessed and managed their effectiveness by adopting metrics like ‘time to answer’, ‘longest queue time’ and ‘longest wait to abandon’. Operating call centres by these measurements often impede employees from providing the quality customer service they want to. Though nobody would deny the necessity of improving customer satisfaction, rewards are rarely based upon this.

What can you do?

Leading edge companies are ditching traditional call centre metrics to focus exclusively on customer focus. Your staff deal directly with your customers: they are the face of your business. Being at the frontline, their knowledge of your business and your customers is unparallelled.

Implementing a staff satisfaction survey is a visible and transparent way of showing your employees that you value their contribution and opinions. Employee surveys can also help you learn from the direct experiences of your staff to drive service improvements.

What are the drivers of employee engagement?

No matter what industry you are in, there are common factors that make employees feel engaged.

• Organisational clarity: Employees like to understand the purpose of their roles and how they fit into an organisation. Companies that have a strong, transparent and explicit organisational culture tend to engender trust and understanding amongst their employees.
• Good management: Managers who are clear about their expectations, offer feedback, support & training and treat each employee as an individual help to increase staff satisfaction.
• Listening: Employees need to feel that their opinions are being listened to and their viewpoints matter.
• Organisational honesty: Companies that live by the values they publicly espouse are much more likely to illicit employee advocacy and trust.

We can help you with all aspects of your employee surveying needs.

Opinion-8 has vast experience in the field of employee research and can assist you in creating a survey that will identify ways to improve employee engagement, advocacy and commitment as well as highlighting ways in which you can serve your customers better.

For more information: www.opinion-8.com/employee feedback

Below are some hints and tips to help you write a successful survey.

• Define your aims clearly. Conducting a survey gives you a unique opportunity to learn from your customers and drive service improvements based on current thinking. Do not waste this opportunity! Clearly establish what you are hoping to learn from the results of this survey and make sure that your questions capture the information that you want to learn.
• Don’t limit your options. IVR surveys provide a very effective way of gaining a customer’s immediate reaction to the service offered at your call centre. Questions regarding an agent’s performance will help you to target and improve customer service. However, focussing exclusively on the agent may mean you fail to glean useful information about the services or products you offer. Consider extending the questions to capture feedback on other aspects of your business.
• Word questions as statements. We recommend that you adopt the Likert Scale in your questionnaires. These questions ask respondents to say to what extent they agree with a number of statements, for example: “I felt the person who took my call was pleasant and polite”; “I have a good work/ life balance.” Typically, you ask the respondent to score out of five, to give people a neutral option. With these types of questions, you can solicit opinions on anything, and are not exclusively dictated to ascertaining levels of satisfaction as you can be with other types of range questions.
• Be consistent. When using the Likert scale, or any other range questions, it is advisable to be consistent with the range used. It will be more intuitive and you will find it more useful when analysing multiple questions if one is always negative and five, positive.
• Let your respondents speak for themselves. Include chances for your customers to leave verbatim comments. Capturing the voice of your customer allows your customers to speak for themselves and means that you do not define the customer experience based exclusively on your company’s metrics and standards.
• Keep it short. Keep your survey relatively short to encourage a higher response rate. Use the words “quick” or “short” in the introduction to reassure your customers that they will not have to devote too much of their time to complete your survey: “In a moment I shall ask you just 10 quick questions, which should take no more than a minute or two of your time.”
• Remember the media. When writing your survey, bear in mind that the questions will be heard, not read by the survey respondents. Give people the options first, followed by the key to press: “Overall how satisfied were you with the way your call was handled? Press one for extremely dissatisfied through to five for extremely satisfied.”
• It’s not a memory test. Do not offer people more than seven options within one question. People will struggle to recall any more choices than that.
• Be clear. Ensure that the options you offer in your survey’s questions are distinct. Not only will you confuse the respondents if more than one of the options offered is applicable to them, but you will also compromise the quality of the data you collect.
• Stress that you’re not selling. It may be an important, depending on the context of your survey, to state clearly at the beginning of your survey that this is not a sales call; that participation is voluntary and that you are purely trying to seek opinion.
• Top and Tail. A good introduction and ending are important. Make the transfer from any previous call as logical and as smooth as possible. At the end, always thank the caller for participating and indicate that they can hang up, with a phrase such as “Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey today. The results will be used to help us improve the service we provide. Goodbye.”
• Test! It is easy to get a rough idea of how long and how clear the questionnaire will be just by reading out all the questions. Include the introduction and a thank you & goodbye, and remember also to allow time for the customer to respond and the response to be confirmed. Also remember that the clearest written instructions may sound odd or awkward when spoken. You will not know until you try it out!

See our white paper and learn how to use customer feedback to drive service improvement.