Honest, open feedback is one of the most important elements of a strong relationship between a contact center manager and employee. A back-and-forth dialogue between a manager and his or her workforce is crucial to the success and efficiency of any good center.

But there’s another kind of feedback that is even more important: The feedback of the customers who call, email, or text to your contact center. There’s no better barometer of how well or poorly a call center is performing than the comments and suggestions you receive from your callers.

So how do you ensure effective caller feedback, and how do you properly parse and organize the data you’re receiving - whether it’s from surveys, follow-up emails, or the caller conversations themselves? Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your customer feedback.

Ask for feedback as soon after the caller’s experience as possible

If you want to truly find out what a caller’s experience was with your center, it’s best to do so quickly. Otherwise the information won’t be fresh in the caller’s mind.

Sometimes, call centers do this while the caller is still on the phone, with an agent asking towards the end of the call if the customer would be willing to answer some questions about their experience, and if they feel their issue was addressed.

Sometimes customers will be irate or irritated by the lack of a satisfactory solution, so the results might be a bit skewed. Overall, however, this is still an important method of gathering feedback.

Keep surveys brief

People lead busy lives, and they’re often not in the mood to stay on the line or push through a long email survey.

Hone your surveys to be as brief, but informative, as possible. Make sure not to take up too much of the caller’s time, or that could negatively affect the way they answer your questions. It won’t do any good to get feedback from a caller who’s annoyed or impatient with the way you get it.

Make sure questions are relevant to your KPIs

You can ask customers an endless variety of questions, but if the answers you receive don’t help you reach your KPI goals, they won’t mean much.

Don’t get wrapped up in questions that might seem useful, but don’t actually provide information that can help you make improvements or changes to your center.

You have a chance to get the most valuable information possible about your center when you seek feedback from a customer, so make sure to figure out which questions will accomplish that goal without bringing in extraneous data that you might not really need.

Use the right customer feedback technology

Customer feedback isn’t useful unless you’re able to parse it properly. That’s where the Enterprise Feedback Management system comes in.

This system will give you comprehensive information about the way customers view your center, and it does so more quickly than other methods thanks to a streamlined process.

With the EFM system, you can share data through customizable reports with a high level of interactivity. You can place your survey results in a central location and make your surveys more personalized for your company. You can also create more detailed reports about the data you receive, allowing your center to get as much information as possible as quickly as possible.

As for the data you receive from your callers, the EFM system can not only ensure that it’s completely secure, it can analyze the specific words used in customer statements (written or verbal) and cull the actual sentiments being expressed.

Not only that, but Enterprise Feedback Management can provide you with you need to properly interpret your KPIs, not to mention helping you create achievable, sensible benchmarks for improvement at your call center.

The EFM system is fast, accurate and secure, and it’s the best way for your center to process your customer feedback.

Want to learn more about using customer feedback to improve your contact center operations? Read our post “How to Become a Customer Feedback Superhero.”