How well do you know your target audience? Do you know how satisfied your customers are with your products and services? Do you know your prospects’ most pressing pain points, or what features they value most in a solution? Do you know what web sites potential customers visit, or the magazines they read, or the trade shows they attend?
The answers to these and similar questions often separate the successful businesses from the underperforming. That’s why more and more companies today are embracing the value of surveys.
Phone Surveys vs. Email Surveys
Unless you plan on surveying people manually (potentially very expensive and time consuming), automated phone surveys or email blasts that direct people to take a web survey are your best and most cost-effective options. And while both survey methods can be effective, here are six points in favor of automated phone surveys:
- On average, people receive dozens, maybe hundreds, of emails every day, but only a handful of phone calls. It’s very easy for your email request to be lost in an overcrowded inbox. A ringing phone stands out and receives superior response rates compared to email.
- With phone surveys, users can record responses with their own voice, enabling freer and more detailed responses. You can also hear the inflection and tone of an answer, giving you nuanced data you just can’t get with typed text.
- It’s just easier for most people to speak a response instead of typing one out, especially if you are trying to solicit in-depth free-form answers.
- Phone surveys are more personal, since you can record your own voice in the greeting and in the questions.
- Phone surveys give people the option of being immediately transferred to a live agent to ask questions, make a purchase, or engage in the sales process.
- More and more people today read their email on their smartphones. If you have a long online survey with multiple web pages full of questions, trying to answer them on a smartphone browser and keypad can be a pain. But what if your email includes a click-to-call link to a phone survey? People can trigger an instant call on their smartphones and answer your questions easily without typing or scrolling.
Also, if you are surveying customers right after a phone conversation, or after a home delivery or any other activity where they are away from their computers, phone surveys make more sense than emails.
Using IVR for Inbound and Outbound Automated Phone Surveys
Proponents of email surveys might counter these points by arguing that building a phone survey is difficult compared to email. This used to be true; back when the IVR technology needed to build a phone survey required in-depth IT programming knowledge to use.
IVR enables a caller to interact with an automated menu?via telephone keypad or voice recognition. And while IVR technology used to require you to build phone surveys by writing code, this is no longer the case. Now there are IVR solutions available that are built specifically for marketers, sales, and support people to use. They are easy to use and make it simple for anyone to build complex automated phone surveys in minutes.
Download The Definitive Guide to Automated IVR Phone Surveys to learn seven popular business use cases for IVR phone surveys and more on automated phone survey best practices.