It may seem a little unbelievable, but just 12 percent of companies attempt to provide fast customer responses. Unfortunately, that is one of the big reasons why a lot of businesses have problems retaining customers. That's why in this article, we will provide some great advice on how to reduce customer service response time.
Best Ways To Reduce Customer Service Response Time and Not Lose Leads
Analyze Your Customer Service Process
How can you start fixing something if you're not up-to-date with the current situation?
Before you begin building your customer retention strategy:
- Analyze your overall support process.
- Start by looking at customer feedback and online reviews concerning your brand and your customer support.
- Try to spot a common theme amongst them.
The next step is to sit down with your customer service staff and go over their overall impression of their sector. Prepare to hear another side of the story - it may be that your agents feel like they are under pressure to perform fast and at an unrealistic pace. They also may feel like they don't have the proper tools to deal with that many customer inquiries.
And finally, calculate your average response time. Compare it to your competitors. As we have seen from the numbers above, companies have a long way to answer customer inquiries quickly
Implement a Help Desk Software
For quicker response times, you will benefit significantly from software that has help desk features.
You can monitor existing customer statuses and activity with Antelope's Retention Dashboard. It makes life simpler by showing all client's actions in one comprehensive overview, drawing your attention to important data about clients' activities. This way, you won't forget about your customers and their needs.
A well-built software will also let you see if your total response time has been reduced or not. You will see various response time data trends, too.
Start a Multi-channel Response
Potential customers are notoriously impatient in today's fast-paced world.
Visitors to your website wait very little before deciding to contact the support staff on another channel. That means you should offer them options to reach your business in multiple ways.
So, instead of treating live chat, email, and social media as separate support channels, you should treat them as one entity. That means that every representative should get customer questions from all available platforms to achieve seamless communication across all channels.
Here's an extra tip: start a comprehensive blog that can help out customers, both when it comes to specific queries about your services and when it comes to learning the tropes of CRM in general.
Use Email Autoresponders to Reduce Customer Service Response Time
Sometimes, all a customer wants is the feeling that someone heard them. They want to know that their complaint was received and being taken care of.
If potential clients don't get responses fast enough, they begin to develop negative feelings about the company. And it's not easy to change that impression.
That's why you will benefit greatly from an email autoresponder. That is technology that isn't hard to implement, and it has been around for a while now. It sends out automated replies to those who have written to your company's representatives.
The email needs to read that the company received the customer's email and that an answer is arriving shortly.
Besides auto-responding to an inquiry, autoresponders have several uses. The client can get an automated email when they:
- Sign up for an email newsletter
- Buy your product or service online
- Change an account setting
- Have left something in the cart or left their profile uncompleted.
Did you know automated emails get 152% higher click rates than other emails? That fuels engagement and lowers the load of a dedicated email marketing campaign.
Set Up Specialized Teams
We have already mentioned that you should sit quarterly with your employees and assess their performances and needs.
To be more specific, you should think about having all the right sectors in place. Having specialized teams in multiple departments helps route incoming client queries.
You can divide the sector by the products and services you offer or their niche (sales, marketing, support, etc.). Do this to make sure that the customers are contacting the correct departments and getting timely responses.
Reduce Customer Service Response Time: Conclusion
Working on getting your customers' fast responses is one of the critical moves for successful CRM. Keep your customers engaged and satisfied while fueling customer retention.
But remember - quality over quantity! Never sacrifice the quality of your responses for the response time. That will most certainly backfire. You will seem unprofessional and lose customers.
Set realistic goals while taking into account your team and their needs, and reduce customer service response time.
It may seem a little unbelievable, but just 12 percent of companies attempt and provide fast responses to their customer. This is one of the big reasons why a lot of businesses have problems retaining customers. That's why in this article we will provide some great advice on how to reduce customer service response time.
