Why AI Voice Surveys Are the Future of Customer Feedback

Voice surveys have become the fastest growing and most impactful way to get customer feedback. We’ll explore why that’s the case, and how to make the most of them.

Voice surveys are a relatively new addition to the customer feedback landscape. After all, voice assistants, which have driven adoption of voice across verticals, are just now reaching ubiquity. In 2015, there were under 400 million users of voice assistants in the world. By 2024, it’s expected that there will be more voice assistants than people. 

Voice is becoming pervasive, and it’s starting to be the primary way that consumers interact with businesses.

So why are voice surveys so effective? How do they compare with traditional text surveys? Let’s dive in to explore why voice surveys are the future of customer feedback, and how to leverage Commerce.AI's voice surveys feature to better listen to your customers.

Voice is the most natural way to communicate

Let’s face it: text surveys are a pain. It takes more time, effort, and deliberation to complete text surveys, which is why they have a higher drop-out rate.

Voice is livelier, more immediate, and more interactive. It’s the most natural way to communicate. It comes across as a friendlier and more fluid option than a stale text survey.

This has a basis in human history, as humans have been communicating with spoken word for as long as 2 million years, while written language has been around for orders of magnitude less time - just a few thousand years. In short, voice is simply more natural, and it’s a better way to get customer feedback.

Voice surveys are more engaging

Voice surveys are also more engaging. That means that there’s less attrition, and fewer people dropping out of the survey. It’s a more natural way to interact, and it’s easier to keep a conversation going.

The statistics on traditional text surveys are damning. In fact, just 2% of customers will bother to complete a text questionnaire. Voice surveys are a novel, better way to engage your customers.

We did a survey about surveys, and found that an astonishing 95% of participants preferred our new voice survey over a traditional survey form. In short, customers prefer voice surveys as they can quickly respond to questions.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a manager at a small company, or a member of a large organization, you can now easily create and deploy surveys with voice functionality. It’s the new way to get feedback from your customers, and the easiest way to get valuable feedback from those who are hard to reach.

Voice is the new text

So, if voice is so great, why aren’t all businesses adopting it?

For starters, the use of voice assistants, smart speakers, and so on is still ramping up. Only about half of the U.S. population has smart speakers, and the number is even lower in other countries and rural areas.

Now, though, smart speakers and voice assistants are becoming mainstream, and the platforms are getting better at understanding natural language.

Voice is becoming the primary way that consumers interact with businesses, and now is the perfect time to start using voice surveys.

Voice surveys for any use-case

Commerce.AI enables the use of voice surveys for any type of survey, including market surveys, new concept surveys, pricing surveys, product feature surveys, new offering surveys, hotel experience surveys, and more.

In other words, voice surveys are incredibly versatile, and any team can use them to level up their customer feedback initiatives.

As we’ve explored, one study showed that 2% of customers will bother to complete a text questionnaire, while our research saw 95% of customers preferring voice-based surveys. This means that you’ll have drastically higher survey completion rates for any use-case by deploying voice surveys.

What do you do with the customer feedback?

Simply collecting a dialogue between you and your customers isn’t enough - regardless of the format you’re using. It’s crucial to correctly analyze this customer feedback to open up new opportunities for growth.

One key action step is identifying areas to improve your products. It’s likely that your users have a deep understanding of your products, as they’ve sought them out to solve problems in their lives.

By listening to those loyal customers, you can surface new opportunities for product innovation, which are harder to uncover in the boardroom. Not only will your customers notice that you’re acting on their feedback, but you’ll gain a new competitive advantage as a business that truly cares about its customers.

In addition, this customer feedback will help you find the right niche and target personas, by surfacing patterns about where your satisfied and dissatisfied customers are coming from.

Finally, customer feedback can be a powerful tool to motivate your team, as your happiest customers will appreciate your product teams’ efforts.

Both positive and negative feedback will spark interesting conversations that can benefit your products, your company morale, and your bottom-line.

Summary 

Voice surveys are demonstrably more effective than traditional text-based surveys, and are a powerful tool for collecting honest, reliable customer feedback at scale. Given the incredibly low completion rates of traditional text surveys, voice surveys are quickly becoming a must-have tool. After all, devoting resources to creating and marketing a text survey, only to have a 2% completion rate, is a failure in anyone’s book.

Armed with the power of high-quality customer feedback via voice surveys, product teams can more effectively improve their products, understand their customers, find the right niches, and stay motivated.