5 Best Practices for Creating a Survey with Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
5 Best Practices for Creating a Survey with Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
You spend a lot of time trying to figure out what your consumers want and need by asking for input, issuing surveys, and observing their behavior.
However, the most effective technique to discover more about your clients is to simply ask them.
Office employees from the millennial generation
Surveys provide valuable input to your business, allowing you to improve customer happiness and loyalty while also demonstrating to customers that their opinions count.
Traditional surveys are made easier and more convenient with interactive voice response (IVR) polls. They’re simple to set up and provide a seamless experience for receivers. Participants interact with the survey by a quick keypress or vocal answer rather than filling out obtrusive internet surveys.
Today, we’ll go over the main advantages of IVR surveys, the many types of IVR surveys you can use right now, and IVR survey best practices to ensure you get the most accurate data.
The Advantages of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Surveys
IVR stands for interactive voice response, and it is a telephone system that recognizes, segments, and directs calls. Participants in IVR surveys respond to a sequence of automated, preset questions using speech recognition technology or a keypad.
IVR surveys provide various advantages over traditional survey methods:
They’re simple to implement, inexpensive, and don’t require a lot of consumer information to get started. In addition, IVR surveys are much less expensive than engaging personnel to conduct live surveys.
Using automated IVR surveys, you may reach a larger audience and get responses faster than using postal or email surveys.
Organizations may rapidly record and act on consumer feedback using the findings of IVR surveys. If you’re conducting a customer service survey, for example, you may track survey findings in real time and allocate issues to the appropriate department or team as needed, ensuring that bad customer experiences are addressed swiftly before they become a problem.
Case Study of an IVR Survey
QuesGen Systems was testing the efficacy of medicines in impoverished nations with OneWorld Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical firm formed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They needed a mechanism to swiftly acquire large amounts of data from poorer countries. They were able to collect massive amounts of data in real-time using an IVR survey, which was significantly faster than typical paper surveys or SMS.
The whole case study can be seen here.
IVR Surveys: What Are They and How Do They Work?
IVR surveys can be modified in hundreds of ways to match your business and organizational demands, and IVR surveys can be used in a variety of ways. The following are some examples of IVR surveys:
Prospects or customers are invited to participate in an inbound IVR survey (this can be sent via an email, letter, or printed marketing material).
Ideal for: Long-term customer satisfaction programs centered on a single, constant phone line.
Call Transfer IVR Survey: Also known as post-call IVR surveys, these campaigns offer clients to participate at the beginning of the contact and then transfer them to a pre-recorded survey after their transaction or service call is completed.
Ideal for: Getting quick, top-of-mind customer feedback, analyzing customer care calls, or getting feedback on a single transaction.
Send voice broadcast messages to a specific population requesting them to participate in a survey via outbound IVR.
Political and community surveys are ideal.
IVR Hybrid: Individuals are invited to engage in an automated IVR survey by a live person.
Ideal for: Finding a cost-effective balance between live surveys and interactive voice response.
More IVR case studies can be found here.
Best Practices for IVR Surveys
If you want your customers to react to an interactive voice response survey, you’ll need more than cutting-edge technology. The seven recommended practices listed below will assist you in creating interesting IVR surveys that yield the desired results.
1. Determine the purpose of your IVR survey.
Your customers will rapidly abandon your survey if it isn’t well-designed. A focused, precise topic keeps your survey on track and produces unmistakable findings.
Take a time to think about your objectives before you start designing your survey. What do you hope to get out of the survey?
The first thought that comes to mind is to start brainstorming survey questions. Instead, consider the questions you’re seeking for:
Our customers are looking for a product of type “X.”
When ____, they become irritated.
The cornerstone of your IVR survey is the list of answers. Answers will help you test your hypothesis and give precise, distinctive solutions that can help you achieve your higher goal.
2. Create IVR questions that are specific to you.
Vague, generic queries can easily perplex your clients and jeopardize your results. The attention span of your audience is limited. Each question takes up significant space in your survey, and broad, general questions might skew survey findings. Make sure your queries are accurate and crafted with a specific aim in mind while writing your IVR script. Assume you wish to assess the effectiveness of your customer service. “Was your agent knowledgeable and helpful?” and “Was your agent knowledgeable and helpful?” are two separate questions. What if they were well-informed yet obnoxious? To gather precise data, make sure the questions are unambiguous and without ambiguity.
3. Keep it succinct and to the point.
Customers are more likely to abandon a survey if it is too long. Keep the survey short to encourage people to complete it. Respondents should take no more than five minutes to complete a survey (post-call surveys should be two to three minutes in length). Providing an estimate of how long it will take to complete the survey at the start of the call can also assist boost response rates.
Here are a few pointers on how to keep your IVR survey questions succinct while still having enough to reach your goal:
To increase the response rate, place the crucial questions near the start of the survey.
Break down large concepts into smaller questions: Open-ended questions can yield a wealth of qualitative information. Customers may find them overwhelming, resulting in reduced response rates. (In addition, evaluating the data takes time.)
Make it easy for your audience to respond to open-ended questions by breaking them down into organized responses.
If you’re trying to figure out how many times a respondent has bought from you, for example, give them ordered answers like “Press zero for never, one for once, and two for twice.”
4. Make Use of the Correct Scale
After you’ve chosen your questions, you’ll need to figure out how to measure your results.
Extreme responses, such as “extremely great” or “very horrible,” are rarely given in surveys.
When using a five-point scale, the majority of replies will be within three points of one another, limiting variability and potentially leading to ambiguous results. Depending on your questions, you may wish to use a larger scale to obtain more precise results.
5. Use Clear, Simple Language
Clear phrasing reduces friction in the process and encourages respondents to complete the survey.
Remove any difficult terminology or industry jargon from your survey if you want the best results. (This is particularly important when conducting political polls.)
Check out these ten ideas for raising funds for your political campaign.
6. Plan Out Your Survey Complexity-based questions
By completing your survey, your customers are doing you a service. So make it simple to finish!
Examine the survey’s structure after you’ve picked your questions. Begin with short, uncomplicated questions and work your way up to more difficult ones. Don’t jump around from section to section, and combine questions that are related together.
7. Make the Most of Your Send Time
Consider when your interactive voice response survey will be sent out.
Send it when your consumers are available to participate to receive the best response. These times will vary every business, and the best time will be determined by your target audience’s demographics.
Send the poll during the day around a typical child’s nap time, for example, if you’re targeting stay-at-home mothers. Sending the survey after work hours, on the other hand, will earn you the best response rate if you’re targeting career professionals.
8. Run a small segment of your survey to see if it works.
Don’t send out the survey to the general public without first testing it. Run a test with a small client segment and evaluate the results to see if there are any gaps.
Is there a particular question where the majority of individuals abandon the survey? Is it possible to improve or clarify the questions in order to generate more responses? Before delivering the survey to your full audience, iterate as needed.
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