Customer feedback solutions: what to look for

Customer feedback software platforms measure key customer experience metrics – such as customer effort, customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS). The technology can be implemented across multiple channels in contact centres and online.

Please rate the performance of your customer service representative,” or so the message goes at the end of a call to a business. Callers are asked to press a number to rate their experience and sometimes invited to record their comments in addition. These simple, yet powerful feedback platforms help organisations benchmark their performance against industry standard, better understand their customers and improve their service through actionable insights.

Identify the right CX metrics to measure

To best utilise customer feedback call centre technology, contact centre leaders should start with a clear understanding of what it is they’re trying to measure. Net Promoter Score (NPS), an indicator of customer advocacy and loyalty, is the most popular metric, but customer effort score (“how easy was it to get your inquiry answered today?”) is becoming more prevalent. And many companies still prefer the simplicity of the long-established Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metric. 

“Customer feedback technology for call centres is most powerful when combined with other feedback data sources from applications like online survey systems and workforce planning tools.”

Furthermore, a clear understanding of when and how to measure customer experience is a must. While for the majority of simple calls (where first contact resolution is targeted), it makes sense to immediately survey the customer after the transaction, for complex inquiries, such as insurance claims, customers prefer to be surveyed once their case is completed. The “how” relates to the technology, and as a rule of thumb, it’s best to survey customers in the channel they have contacted you. For example, a caller should be offered a post-call IVR survey, and online/email surveys are better for online transactions.  Contact centre agents should also be trained in the benefits of soliciting customer feedback – both to help continually improve their own performance, as well as for the organisation to know their customers better.

Customer experience feedback software is available on-premise or as a cloud service and should be agnostic to the type of back-end systems it’s used with. In terms of telephony integration, look for vendors which offer integration with popular systems to make the installation as seamless as possible.

With some vendors, implementation takes less than a day with only short (less than an hour) user training required. Pricing can be a traditional model of per user plus annual maintenance, or structured “as a service”, where licences and support are rented on a monthly per user, per product basis.

Once up and running, the customer service feedback software should be intuitive enough for administrators and supervisors to configure and operate it with no need to call the vendor for routine changes.

Counting the Return on Customer Experience technology

Effective use of customer feedback tools can have a two-fold ROI – higher customer retention and development of more “advocates” who will help promote the good service experience of your organisation.

Proactive feedback management systems can alert managers of any problems which will reduce customer loss. Using a measure such as NPS can turn customers into advocates. It’s good practice to provide customers with a forum to report on service levels and promote new offerings.

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Last updated on: March 18, 2022