Customer satisfaction survey software and survey companies

• Customer satisfaction survey software automates sending surveys, collecting responses and reporting. You design and run the program yourself.
• Voice of the customer (VoC) platforms combine survey results with other feedback, such as complaints, reviews and call analytics, for a fuller picture.
• Telephone survey and market research companies call customers for you, with trained interviewers and research expertise.
• Employee pulse check tools run short, regular surveys of your own team.

Looking for independent research instead? See call quality assessment and mystery shopping or benchmarking and research.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): how likely customers are to recommend you, on a 0 to 10 scale. A measure of overall loyalty.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): how satisfied a customer was with a specific interaction, asked straight after it.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): how easy it was to get an issue resolved. High effort is a strong warning sign for churn.

How surveys reach customers

• After-call surveys by IVR or SMS, linked to the call and agent
• Email surveys after a transaction or interaction
• SMS surveys for quick, high-response feedback
• In-app and website surveys triggered by what the customer is doing
• Relationship surveys every quarter or year
• Telephone surveys by a trained interviewer

• Integration: triggers surveys from your CRM, contact centre platform or ticketing system at the right moment.
• Closing the loop: alerts your team to low scores so they can call the customer back quickly.
• Linking feedback to performance: connects scores to agents, teams, channels and contact reasons.
• Text analysis: uses AI to find themes in written comments at scale.
• Reporting people will use: dashboards for agents, team leaders and executives.
• Data protection: where responses are stored and how personal information is handled.

Ask whether the supplier also offers a managed service, where they design surveys and analyse results for you.

Phone surveys reach customers who ignore emails, and suit longer or more detailed questions. They need a neutral interviewing style: respondents must feel free to answer honestly, without feeling sold to. Not every telemarketing provider can do this well.

• Customer satisfaction and NPS surveys
• Market research and product feedback
• Employee and stakeholder research
• Database cleansing and contact verification

Ask how interviewers are trained and monitored, which interviewing system they use, how they manage quotas and sample, and how results will be delivered.

A pulse check is a short survey of 5 to 10 questions, run monthly or quarterly. In high-turnover teams, an annual survey often arrives after the people with concerns have already left.

• Spot falling engagement in a team within weeks
• Hold team leaders accountable for engagement
• Measure whether training or changes made a difference
• Get higher response rates than long annual surveys