In last week’s post, we discussed several reasons why traditional, face-to-face exit interviews don’t work. In today’s article, we take a look at a far more efficient and data-rich alternative: automated exit interviews.

By automating your exit interviews and moving them online, you can access the following advantages:

  • Online honesty: This refers to the tendency of respondents to be more honest when completing online surveys than when they are interviewed by a person. Automating your exit interviews will result in more accurate, more honest exit data (and consequently more accurate decisions based on the results).
  • Comparable data: If all staff members complete the same exit questionnaire, under similar conditions, you can easily compare data from different business units, divisions, and teams. As mentioned last time, face-to-face interviews often differ depending on who’s conducting the interview.
  • Quick reporting: Face-to-face interviews require transcription and a lot of interpretation. Online exit interviews can be primarily quantitative and reports (both individual and group) can be pre-built and drawn instantaneously with a touch of a button.
  • Searchable database: Face-to-face interview data invariably ends up in anonymous filing cabinets (or folders on a PC). Using an automated system to take care of your exit interviews however, ensures that data is always at your fingertips, and a great deal safer to boot!
  • Trends: Even if you love face-to-face exit interviews, the most challenging aspect of their results is to spot trends inside your company, especially if multiple people conducted the interviews. An automated system that uses the power of big data analysis solves this problem. And that is ultimately the most important reason why you’d be doing exit interviews in the first place — to see if there are any persistent internal or external threats to your staff’s engagement and retention.

So, if you’re still doing exit interviews the old-fashioned way, consider automation. It’s definitely worth it!

For more on automated exit interview solutions, visit our page here.