If you use a customer feedback program, you know the value of post transactional feedback from your customers. You provide a link to a feedback survey at the bottom of the receipts, on your website, and possibly even through POP signage.
How do your telephone customers provide feedback? You may want to consider a “hot transfer” program to incorporate into your existing feedback program.
Here’s how it works. Say you have a phone based feedback program in which customers call a toll-free number to provide feedback. Depending on your telephone system, this toll-free number can be programmed into your system so that once a call with one of your customer service representatives is complete, it will transfer the call to the feedback survey.
Sounds great, right? I’m sure you are also thinking of a few issues that may arise with the hot transfer system. Let me see if I can address them below:
1. Employees won’t transfer the call to the feedback service for all calls, especially the ones that don’t go so well: the hot transfer system will automatically transfer calls to the feedback service as soon as your employee ends the call – they do not have control over which customers get into the feedback system. Since every call will have the opportunity to provide feedback, this is not something you need to worry about.
2. Customers will be annoyed by this system: not at all! Customers, as you know, love giving feedback. It shows that you care about their experience and want to do better. Like traditional feedback programs, of course not everyone will want to participate. You can set your phone system to throw an automated recording (along the lines that you do for recordings: “This call may be monitored for quality control…”) that asks customers to press 1 if they would like to provide feedback at the end of the conversation. This not only makes them aware that you’ll be asking about their experience and make them more aware of the details of the call, but it gives them the option to participate or opt out.
3. Customers won’t provide negative feedback for fear the employee will know who left the feedback – after all, they typically have the customer’s account number: customers are opting in to take the survey prior to the call taking place. Yes, they can hang up if they change their mind, but assuring customers that their responses are completely confidential can help in obtaining negative feedback. You want to encourage this group as their feedback is what can best help you to improve.
If you haven’t considered the hot transfer method of customer feedback, or if your current provider doesn’t offer this service, please let us know and we’d be happy to help! You can leave a comment below or email us for more information.
