After spending 15 minutes on the phone to my bank the nice lady asks me if I would hold on after she hangs up to take a short survey. Sure what’s one more survey to someone who lives them 24/7!

After a couple of prompted button pushes to enter scores I get the chance to provide verbal feedback. I’m not the type to use circumlocution, I like to get straight to the point and I proceed with a relatively detailed account of a recent issue. I’m only half way through when I’m interrupted with a tone and told that the recording has ended.

But I had so much more to say.

Not a great experience.

Post call IVR surveys like this are popping up everywhere with more and more organisations using the approach to gather transactional customer feedback.

The question is not whether they are possible, clearly they are, but whether they are useful. It turns out: much less so than you might think.

In this post I compare post call IVR surveys to email invites for web surveys to see which is more effective. I also provide a checklist of things that you must do if you want to be successful.

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Adam Ramshaw

Adam Ramshaw has been helping companies to improve their Net Promoter® and Customer Feedback systems for more than 15 years. He is on a mission to stamp out ineffective processes and bad surveys.