Take it from Bill Gates: Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Post-call SMS surveys provide an avenue for customers to provide their feedback, and thus function like your gateways to understanding your customers’ needs and wants.

Feedback allows you to quantify customer satisfaction (CSAT) or net promoter scores (NPS), while deeper insights play a role in guiding management decisions across customer support, sales, product development and more.

In this article, we will focus on collecting customer feedback via post-call SMS surveys. 

What is a post-call survey?

With phone support being such a high-touch channel, post-call surveys are a great way to collect customer insights on your service quality. When a call ends, the customer is prompted to rate their satisfaction on a scale, through a series of simple questions.

Here, you have a few options to trigger automatic feedback collection through SMS questionnaires, interactive voice response (IVR) feedback surveys.

Each survey channel has its own merits. For instance, IVR surveys are triggered immediately at the end of a session and capture your customer’s impressions while their memory is still fresh. SMS surveys allow your customers to respond at their own convenience, which gives them time to consider their answers and provide insightful feedback before submission.

Collect CSAT and NPS ratings from all channels

Customer feedback can come in all forms and directions. Cover your bases by collecting data from all channels: email, voice, live chat and social media. Combine survey findings to get a holistic view on customer satisfaction, compare results between channels, and identify performance gaps for improvements.

Benefits of post-call SMS surveys

Get an outside-in perspective on how your customers are impacted. While metrics like average call waiting times give you a basal understanding of how your call center or help desk operations is doing, customer insights from post-call SMS surveys help you complete the picture.

FocalScope is designed with the features to help you analyse data, draw out trends, and deploy the needful changes quickly and easily.

1. Deploy service recovery

Upon receiving a low-score alert, supervisors can trace back call logs and recordings to determine if intervention is required, and if so, which kind would work best. With the full picture, supervisors are empowered to deploy service recovery quickly and prevent any escalation that may hurt your brand.

2. Send new or struggling agents to ‘Training Mode’

Low scores are also an indicator for your agents’ training needs, and customer feedback can point you where the problem lies, be it service speed, quality, demeanour, or product knowledge. Send new or struggling agents through our customer service training features to get them up to par.

3. Cross reference surveys insights and call reports

By studying the relationship between survey results and call logs, you can cross reference metrics like waiting times and handling times against customer satisfaction. For instance, you can examine how long your customers are willing to wait before satisfaction drops, establish it as a benchmark, and leverage routing and SLAs to maintain this golden standard.

Snapshot: Incorporate CSAT and NPS ratings into your daily dashboards and reports.

Key features of a post-call SMS survey

Once a phone interaction ends and the customer hangs up, an SMS survey is sent to their mobile phone. The SMS contains a unique link that opens up into a mobile-friendly online survey for them to enter and submit their feedback.

1. Customise survey questions and language

Choose a pre-built CSAT or NPS SMS survey template, or come up with your own survey questions. Multi-language surveys are also supported: If a customer selects English in your IVR phone menu, they will automatically get an SMS and survey in the corresponding language.

2. Get low-rating alerts and trace calls

Opt in to receive email notifications when a low score is received, and trace back each survey to its original call log. There, you can retrieve the call recording to playback the exact conversation, and uncover potential reasons behind the poor rating.

3. Fine tune SMS survey recipients

Depending on your goal, you can adjust survey parameters to get more accurate findings. Below, we share a few popular settings that may also help you:

• • Send only to customers who have completed the call:
    You can choose to send SMS surveys only to customers who have actually spoken to an agent and completed the call. Those who have exited the queue (e.g. those who found answers in your IVR menu, or left a voicemail etc.) will be excluded.
• • Set survey cadence:
    Define the time period (e.g. 1 week) in which a new survey is triggered to the same customer. This prevents survey fatigue and avoids spamming customers.
  • Send to mobile numbers only:
    Customers may call you via their mobile phones as well as landlines at home or the office. FocalScope only triggers SMS surveys for mobile phone numbers, so that you can measure survey completion rates more accurately, and avoid excessive charges from SMS providers.

4. Incorporate with call logs, live dashboards and reports

Add survey-related metrics to your live dashboards and reports for a more holistic view on your daily operations. Include average CSAT/NPS ratings, survey completion rates and more.

Post-call SMS surveys for call centers, contact centers and BPOs

Contact centers and BPOs can create a set of post-call SMS surveys tailored to each client account. Accumulate positive scores and testimonials to grow your reputation for high service quality. Incorporate survey results with call reports to evidence your SLA performance for tender submissions and renewals.

Start collecting customer feedback today

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