Is it time to kill off the post-contact survey, for good?

One of the questions we’ve found ourselves asking clients recently is, how valuable is CSAT scoring in measuring customer experience performance? We wrote recently about this very topic – advocating for customer effort scoring, rather than CSAT… A logical argument, given that multiple studies have concluded that CSAT is not a reliable barometer for loyalty.

But regardless of the metrics you track, there’s a bigger elephant in the room... Post-contact surveys.

Client sentiment towards this method of information capture seems to be skewing more towards the negative recently, and when you look more closely, it’s not hard to see why. CX Today reported back in 2021 that feedback rates had dropped from around 20% to just 5% over the previous few years, and that's unlikely to get any better. Even at 5% it’s not a sufficient sample to derive any meaningful insights. And certainly not enough to support any business case for change.

It's also true that customers who suffer a bad experience are much more likely to respond to a feedback survey, which further skews the results.

In an effort to address falling response rates some companies have taken the step of shortening their surveys, and it’s not uncommon today to see surveys with just one question or, at most, one numerical question with an additional open text field. But whilst these shorter surveys may encourage slightly improved response rates, it also hugely diminishes the quality and value of feedback received. In particular, it lacks the “why” context from the respondent, which means whilst CX leaders may know their experience is falling short, they don’t have the context to know what to do to improve. It’s the ultimate catch 22.

What’s the alternative?

Luckily, capturing quality feedback at scale, with minimal intervention is a reality today with advanced speech and text analytics tools such as Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, Nexidia (NICE), and Avoira. These technologies enable real time and historical analysis of conversations between your customers and your staff. You can feed historical recorded conversations into the analytics tool and – with a little upfront configuration for context and accuracy – start generating deep insights into customer contact behaviour, agent adherence, emerging trends, competitive intelligence, agent, and customer sentiment, and much more.

How does this approach replace post-contact surveys?

With advanced analytics, you no longer need to deploy surveys to customers. Instead, you can use recorded conversations to derive the insights that customers may or may not have provided through a survey. Some clients are even using analytics to predict a score, based on verbatim data generated during an interaction.

The core benefits to this approach are obvious:

• Eliminates response rate challenges

• Generates insights based on live data

• No recall bias

• No extreme response bias

• Identifies the why alongside the what

• Streamlines and simplifies QA

But conversational analytics opens a whole world of additional data and insight, much of which would have been very challenging to obtain, unless of course you have a large team of QAs proactively reviewing every interaction.

• Understand exactly why customers are contacting your company

• Identify process issues that need to be addressed

• Understand which agents excel, and what makes them successful

• Identify common repeat interaction types, to improve first contact resolution

• Categorise contacts to identify the most relevant topics

• Spoken phrase detection for agent compliance

• Customised supervisor alerts and escalations

• and more…

Getting started

Many clients start their analytics journey by sampling an existing dataset, usually historical call recordings, which can be fed into the engine to generate instant insights. Many providers also offer a proof of value service: For example, AWS can offer a 30-day trial of Contact Lens for Amazon Connect clients; and Avoira - which is platform agnostic - can also support a proof of value approach.

However, it is important that you define what you want to learn and achieve from a trial run, and furthermore important that you fully understand what the insights generated mean.

That’s where Acceleraate can help. With years of CX experience, and a data-driven optimisation approach, we can help companies to plan, select, and get started with speech and text analytics solutions. We’ll work collaboratively with you to identify your objectives and success criteria, suggest a best-fit analytics solution, and help you to prove the value.

For more information, or to get started on retiring your post-contact surveys, and generating more reliable and actionable CX and EX insights, contact us today.