The ROI of Real-Time Customer Feedback With Voice Surveys

In contact centers, the customer experience happens in real-time. As a result, the acceleration from a loyal to dissatisfied customer can be mere minutes. The shift from loyal to dissatisfied is often due to a gap between understanding their actual experiences and what experiences you intended. To identify and fix the gap, you need real-time customer feedback at the moment of contact, when the opinion is fresh.

CX Is Real-Time. Your Data Should Be Too.

Like many CX-centric companies, you’re probably proactively engaging customers with surveys by email, text, or through your website. Perhaps you’re even sending customers a few questions by email as soon as their contact center call completes. These passive methods can yield beneficial insights; however, the response rates are poor and can often take several hours, if not days, to collect. Using this method could take weeks to identify the gap between actual and intended customer experiences. Today’s consumer effortlessly switches brands after just one poor customer experience. You can’t afford to rely on passive data collection to understand the current state of your customers’ experiences.

Automated Voice Surveys By Phone For Real-Time Data

The best way to rapidly close the gap between actual and intended customer experiences is through a post-call voice survey. This way, we capture customer feedback at the moment of contact while still having them on the line. Their opinion will be fresh, and providing it is frictionless.

Automated voice surveys by phone capture feedback at the moment of contact and feed your Qualtrics or other CX analytics platform in real-time. Armed with real-time data, as it happens, you’ll be able to quantify and quickly address issues causing the gap. Perhaps the cause is something as simple as agent training that missed the mark. With real-time data, you can identify such problems in hours, not weeks.

Assigning A Value To Real-Time Voice of The Customer

Knowing the cause of the gap between intended and actual experiences is essential and has real value. To quantify results, many of our customers assign a dollar value to each voice of the customer survey result. The value given is typically the amount they’d be willing to pay in gift cards or other perks. Depending on the industry and type of survey, the value has ranged between $5 and $15 per response.

Now that we have assigned a value, we can estimate the return on investment for voice surveys. We’ll look at three customers needing three different types of feedback from their customers. In each case, we factor the cost of delivering surveys against the value assigned for each voice of the customer result. One-time setup costs aren’t factored in and can vary depending on the survey complexity. Let’s dig in.

Self-Storage: Customer Satisfaction
$155,400 ROI

A growing regional chain of self-storage facilities needs to identify when and where customer service problems are happening quickly. They’ve noticed an increasing number of negative Internet reviews. In response, they hired a customer excellence person to get to the bottom of it. The first strategy is to launch a simple customer satisfaction survey at the end of calls to their contact center. It asks two or three simple questions:

• How was your recent experience with us?
• Would you recommend us to family or friends?
• Would you like someone to call you?

When one of the first two questions is neutral or negative, the caller receives the third question. If the first two responses are positive, then the third question is never asked. The value of a completed response for this simple survey is $5. Let’s examine the ROI:

Short surveys such as this often receive high response rates. In some cases, with a warm transfer from the agent, up to 50% of callers will enter the short survey. In this use case, we were seeing about 35% of callers entering the voice survey. Another advantage of shorter surveys is high completion rates, 85% for this customer. With high response and completion rates, the ROI is significant, just over $150,000 annually.

Consumer Finance: Learning From New Customers
$177,480 ROI

This next example is a consumer finance company that needs to understand how to improve the experience of new customers. They believe they’re doing their best to deliver the intended experience but need to confirm. Also, they’re asking a few additional questions, such as;

• Did your new credit card arrive on time?
• Would you please rate the experience of activating your new credit card?
• How would you prefer to contact us? (voice, text, chatbot, email)

In total, their survey comprised of seven questions, all answerable by a phone keypad or voice; “Press two or say no for no.”

Response rates in consumer finance tend to be low; however, this company achieved a consistent 17% response rate with a warm transfer. Also, by placing the most important questions first, they could capitalize on incomplete responses in real-time. The data helped them immediately gauge the success (or not) of refinements to the new customer journey. The survey has provided invaluable customer insights, with an annual ROI of nearly $180,000.

Health Insurance: Fixing The Experience
$144,750 ROI

This final example involves a large health insurance provider tasked with improving the experience of insured individuals and families. Federal and state regulatory commissions required substantive improvements in customer service across all touch-points. Their email and web-based surveys received a low response rate (less than 1%) and were not meeting the regulators’ requirements.

The automated voice survey became part of every contact center call, even for callers using self-service. For some, because of the complex skip-logic necessary for the various insurance plans, the survey could take 8 minutes to complete. But like the consumer finance company’s survey, they placed the most important questions first to get immediate insight from incomplete responses.

With the need to meet regulatory requirements, they assigned a high value of $12 per response. And with surveys at the moment of contact achieving ten times the response rate of other methods, they quickly satisfied the regulators. But most importantly, they rapidly gained valuable insights that allowed them to fast-track important agent training issues. Insights that may have taken weeks or months to achieve through email and web surveys. While we calculated an ROI of over $140,000 for the survey, the return on investment extended well beyond that. Thanks to the insights gained and new agent training, their contact center efficiency and first-call resolution improved dramatically.

The ROI Of CX Transformation
Priceless

Collecting fresh customer voices at the moment of contact is vital to closing the gap between intended and actual experiences. Now your enterprise needs to invest in committing to closing that gap. Having the data, and identifying the return on collecting it, is just the first step to CX transformation. Understanding how it will impact your bottom line is essential. Our friends at Kantar have an excellent blog post about Getting started on the ROI of Customer Experience.

We’re ready to help you gather real-time customer feedback at the moment of contact with automated voice surveys by phone. Contact us to learn more and understand what your ROI will be.