Follow-up Survey/Transaction Survey
Posted by Vovici Blog on Fri, Jun 26, 2009
The follow-up or transactional survey concerns itself with getting customer feedback regarding a specific transaction, such as a purchase, a call to a contact center, a request for service or a product return.
Such surveys can be conducted for multiple reasons. They are a great way to perform quality control to determine the level of service being provided and can be used to determine inconsistencies in providing service. Follow-up surveys can identify dissatisfied customers so that service recovery can be attempted and can measure the effectiveness of service staff.
Here are some of the more common mistakes I’ve seen when organizations conduct transactional surveys:
- Asking respondents to specify details about the transaction rather than using data integration behind the scenes to record that information
- Allowing service staff to select or influence potential respondents, for instance, by transferring some calls but not others to an IVR system—this results in skewed results that typically overstate satisfaction
- Failing to include any survey alerts or email triggers to enable service recovery to be attempted
- Failing to invite the recipient more than once to take the survey, which can result in bias
- Compensating employees on survey results in a way that encourages gaming the system and unethical behavior
- Not sharing survey results with service staff
- Having the questionnaire take more time to complete than the transaction itself—here’s a retail example and an auto club example
- Inviting participants on a monthly basis rather than weekly or daily—respondents are typically unable to answer in detail after more than a week has passed
- Conversely, inviting participants to take the survey before the incident is resolved
- Failing to implement touch-frequency rules where respondents are not invited too often; for instance, not invited more than once in a 30-day period
- Failing to implement a survey unsubscribe process so that customers can opt out of recieving surveys altogether
What mistakes have you seen in transactional surveys you've taken?