Quote of the Day...

"What's Difficult to Measure is Very often Wrongly Measured...Customer Satisfaction is One of those things."
Tahir Khan.

Approx 41% of call center's use survey by telephone and rest rely on emails and other channels. Sources reveal that phone surveys are costlier than email surveys. Well it is very important to measure customer satisfaction realistically and it may be costly, however not measuring and leveraging that data would cost even more.

Another common point of failure is inability of analytics to separate customer satisfaction evaluations from any/all quality monitoring done in a call center.

With independent surveys, you will gather information from the customers themselves without having to "interpret" whether or not the customers were satisfied with the service.
While Call monitoring(remote) will give you a realistic picture of compliance and process adherence, it can be utilized as an accesory in evaluation of customer satisfaction (Commonly referred to "surrogate" in the call center world). The risk in capitalizing this data is that, it is very much dependant on the skill and outlook of the monitoring evaluator hence should always be of secondary value in measuring customer satifaction.

One probable disadvantage of phone surveys is that Most customers will not take the initiative to complain to the agent while talking to the surveyer. Instead, they will tell their friends and co-workers how good or bad their experience was. By offering them an independent email survey to comment on their experience, customers have the opportunity to voice their opinions and you can (operationally)assure them that any problems/trends and behaviours encountered are addressed immediately. This will work well to maintain their loyalty and avoid losing your customers to competitors.

The best way forward in these and all times would be to blend both channels randomly to arrive at a more practical measure.