For those of us in the customer service industry, we tend to take a lot of stock in how happy our customers are, or appear to be. We live and die by our CSAT, CES and NPS scores – cheering when they tick up, and scratching our heads when they dip. “Why would these people rate us so low?!” is a question we ask ourselves from time to time, pouring over call recordings to figure out where our processes could be improved. But for us, and for every other company that operates a contact center, we finally have a solution: post-call surveys.

For managers of call centers, post-call surveys are essential in training, coaching, and strengthening your customer service representatives. Here’s how:

Quality, Not Just Quantity

The problem with relying entirely on NPS to gauge your is, while they do provide a good baseline for how your customer service reps are doing, they lack any form of context. It’s like telling a student in a classroom that they failed an assignment, but not providing any feedback whatsoever why they failed the assignment. And as you know, when it comes to customer service, the why is almost always more important than the what. 

With post-call surveys, you have the option to ask any survey questions you want, and respondents can give you a score between 1 and 5. However, the true magic is the system then allows someone to provide context in a verbal response. As in, if they gave you a five, the system would then allow them to leave a short verbal message explaining why they gave you a five.

The Ultimate in Customer Service Training

Having this extra layer of customer feedback is essential to improving processes and coaching employees. We have other call center tools that are great for training, such as our Call Recording feature, or Whisper, Listen, Barge. Unfortunately, even these have their limitations. You can listen to a recording of a phone call all day, and not hear anything amiss. But when a customer can directly tell you why they are unhappy, it allows you to address an agent’s calls, and discover process or personnel issues you would not get from a score alone.

New Dimensions to Customer Satisfaction Reporting

We’ve all sat through meetings where someone discusses the company’s NPS, highlighting which direction it’s heading, and how we compare with the competition. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain why a particular score has been given. However, with post-call surveys, a call center manager has more tools at their disposal for providing context to scores. Our post-call surveys can be transcribed, and compiled for a monthly report. Beyond that, FluentStream’s software can perform a sentiment analysis on these transcripts, scanning for words that either indicate a positive or negative experience.

For instance, the software can scan for words such as, “happy,” “excited,” “helpful,” to demonstrate a positive interaction, or “disappointed,” “unhelpful,” or “f&#!” for a negative experience. Now, not only will you be reporting an aggregate score, but you’ll also be confidently explaining why your team earned that score.

You can check that box all day.