In today’s fast-paced world, people expect their queries, enquiries and complaints to be answered fast. In fact, according to Statista, customer service expectations are growing year-on-year, with people now expecting faster turnaround than they did in 2018.
As 94% of people say that customer service experiences can convince them to buy a product again, it’s essential that a company focuses closely on delivering outstanding customer service at all times.
Obviously, meeting customer expectations regarding response times can be a difficult challenge, especially as those expectations increase.
The good news is, despite these challenges it is still possible to meet these expectations.
WHY IS SPEED SO CRUCIAL WHEN IT COMES TO CUSTOMER SERVICE
Customers value customer service very highly. In fact, 96% of customers say good customer service would inspire them to remain loyal to a brand.
Many customers expect answers to their queries immediately or at least within 10 minutes. If you can’t meet these expectations, they will begin to check out your competitors to find those that can.
HOW TO REDUCE RESPONSE TIMES IN YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT
The good news is, there are ways to improve your customer response times without spending loads of money or making enormous changes to your company. Here are some of them.
Check your current response times
You can’t check how fast your customer service responses have become in the future if you don’t know what speed they are now.
To work out your average first response time, simply add up all your first response times for a set period and then divide this number by how many resolved tickets you achieved in this time.
Once you have this figure, you can start to plan your improvements. As you implement these, you can measure their success rate against your original response rate.
Respond to let them know you received their enquiry
An immediate automated email or message to let your customer know their enquiry has been received and is being dealt with can help them to feel reassured. If you can give an estimate as to when this enquiry is likely to be dealt with, this will help even more.
Invest in technology.
Trying to answer every email or social media message manually can be a massive task. Unless you have a huge customer service team who are all incredibly well-trained, you will never manage to answer queries quickly and efficiently.
Try investing in a unified communications system, as this will help you stay organised and increase your speed. It will also enable you to talk to your customers on multiple platforms at any given time.
As all your communications software can be found in one place, there is no time lost searching for the relevant app, platform or channel. This speeds things up considerably too. Use business mobile telephony to assist with communications and responses too.
Devise scripts and templates
Find out what questions your customer service department gets asked the most, then create scripts and templates that will deal with these issues, leaving blank spaces within them so customer details can be filled in either manually or via software automation.
For live support, like telephone helplines, have your teamwork from scripts designed to answer frequently asked questions when relevant.
By using scripts and templates, your team doesn’t have to continuously type up similar responses time and time again.
