Posts

How to Drastically Improve Customer Service with Customer Response Times

How to Improve Customer Service?

The on-demand digital economy and the high standard set by businesses like Amazon have created a new kind of consumer: The NOW Customer. They’re the ones who are always on and expect rapid resolutions and engaged interactions from their brands.

What is a Customer Service Response Time?

Customer service response time is the average length of time it takes your company’s support team to respond to a customer’s request or complaint ticket via contact form email, social media DM, live chat or any other channel.

The more familiar you are with response time data and the quicker you respond and meet the customer in the moment, the more likely they will become a five-star fan.

So how do you improve response times? First, let’s start off with determining what the best customer support responses look like.

The Best Customer Support Responses – Quality

There is a huge disconnect between the businesses and customers in how they perceive customer support response and the level of customer service provided. Bain & Company found that 80% of companies in the United States believe they are delivering a superior service. And yet, only 8% of customers believe that they are receiving excellent service. That gap between perception and reality is… alarming.

Perhaps this is because many companies are using “vanity metrics” to measure the success of customer service interactions. In a 2020 Simplr survey of CX leaders, we asked which metric is most actively measured, monitored, and reported on:

74% measure CSAT and NPS on a consistent basis
38% measure resolution time on a consistent basis

While CSAT and NPS are the most popular, they rarely tell the full story and often contribute to (undetected) instances of customer neglect. Resolution time, on the other hand, tells a fuller story, and it’s a metric that more companies need to embrace in order to overcome exceptional CX.

Email Responses to Customers

Simplr mystery shopped over 650 ecommerce brands during ”Cyber 5,” the period of time between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The results revealed surprising lapses in response times, ones that cost businesses millions in potential missed revenue.

brands that took longer than 24 hours to respond to a customer service email were missing out on $2 million a day.

Here’s what we found when it came to email response time:

Only 13% of pre-sale emails were answered under one hour
27% of customer service email took longer than 24 hours

How long did it take to get a non-auto email response from the company?

Why Improve the Customer Service Channel?

Clearly, customer service response times are an area businesses can make drastic improvements, improve the customer service experience, and stand out from their competitors. Remember, customer satisfaction is now the biggest differentiator of brands, replacing price and product quality.

In their report “Understanding the Real Expectations of Today’s Connected Customer,” the CMO Council found that the most important attribute of a good CX, according to the customers’ themselves, is a fast response time.

Most important attribute of the customer experience

Fast response time: 75%
Consistency across channels: 55%
Knowledgeable staff: 52%
Clear consistent messaging: 46%
A person to speak with: 37%
Multiple contact points: 28%
Easy to use service tools: 23%

Not only can it help you make your customers happy and enhance your brand’s reputation, but when done properly, it can also improve efficiencies throughout your entire organization. Yet, with the average response taking more than 12 hours, it’s clear that many companies could be doing more to reduce this figure.

Six ways to improve your customer service response times

It’s obvious from the statistics and stories above that there is huge room for improvement in customer service response times. But which tools and strategies will work best in your customer service channels and for your customer service team? Here are six ways that virtually any company can quickly utilize to offer customers a much better customer experience with fast response service.

1. Use Human Cloud technology to scale support

Flexible, on-demand customer service solutions like Simplr give businesses the opportunity to leverage thousands of on-demand (human) customer service agents. The added bandwidth ensures that every customer can be responded to at best-in-class speed.

Employment of highly-skilled customer service representatives is always the best but with Simplr’s easy-to-understand setup and functionality, you can opt in employment of newer customer service agents that have less experience. AI-powered Simplr features and functionality will surely be a game changer to your customer service response time.

2. Start using business software to meet customer expectations

Software (aka ticketing systems) helps run virtually every aspect of a modern company. From inventory to timekeeping, from design to accounting, there is a clever piece of technology helping automate, save time, and streamline virtually any business process you can think of.

But a lot of companies still rely on their ordinary email platform to handle inquiries. That usually means having a single email address for customers that goes to a shared inbox that’s accessible to everyone. This is an utterly chaotic system that often leads to a “black hole” where emails enter never to be heard from again.

Modern help desk software

Get a software that helps you be ahead of the competition, allows you to impose well-organized structures on your inquiries. Emails can be organized according to the email address that sent them, allowing your agents to look back on their entire history, isolate previous problem areas, and immediately catch up on an email train that they’d lost track of.

Customer service software enables you to handle all your inbound requests whether it be sales or marketing or support, from one common help desk interface. All your emails Gmail, Outlook, etc. can be converted into actionable tickets, then categorized and prioritized for your support team to either respond to them or assign them to the appropriate team for their action.

Not only does this help reduce response times by ordering emails in a manner that makes it infinitely easier and quicker to retrieve information and identify missed emails, it also improves service by enhancing your agents’ knowledge of the customer. It would also make the customer feel like they are doing instant messaging with your support team, which is a huge plus to your customer satisfaction rate.

Rather than having to piece together client information from emails scattered throughout a shared inbox, your support team has access to a complete and comprehensive picture of the customer and their inquiry.

3. Automate your responses

In any industry, it’s often that a customer only needs to know they’ve been heard. They have a simple question and need a simple, fast response. In addition, more times than not, the majority of inbound emails and SMS messages are about the same subject. You do not need a customer support agent to handle these and repeat the same answer over and over again. And the customer does not need to wait!

Market research proves how busy everyone’s target market is and this should be a great indicator that you need to take customer service response time very seriously.

This is where automated responses can be proven not a fad and be used to serve the customer best as well as elevate your customer service. Less than 10% of companies use autoresponders, but this simple technology can be used to let a customer know you have received their email and what they should expect to happen next.

If you’re focused on reducing first-response rates, automated responses can be used in three main ways:

An immediate automated email for every inquiry received
Certain types of common inquiries receive an automated response
An automated email is used for messages received out of business hours

You may feel that an automated response is impersonal and will alienate your customers. But as I said, often all a customer wants is to be acknowledged and an automatic response is a excellent way to:

Thank them for their message so the customer knows you’re taking their communication seriously
Remind the sender of the opening hours of your customer service department and how it might take several hours until their email is seen by someone
Set expectations up front and Inform the customer of your average response times
Provide links to FAQs and other self service tools that they might not have been able to find on your company website

4. Implement an alarm system

No, this doesn’t mean you have to install flashing lights and sirens to keep your customer service teams constantly on edge. If you’re aiming to respond to emails within a certain amount of time, you need better risk management and a simple way to manage that target and ensure deadlines are met. It’s very easy to lose track of which emails have a response requirement and to miss inquiries that get buried during busy times.

It works like this: Upon receiving an inquiry, a customer service agent decides when it’s necessary to return to the email. They then set an alarm that acts as a reminder. This allows busy human agents to read an email and return to it later, should it not require an immediate response. It gives agents an opportunity to go away and research the correct solution and it ensures unopened or unclaimed emails are picked up before the deadline for response

However, if you use customer service software, you can set this up automatically and tag new emails with a timer. Simply work out how quickly you would like to respond to your customers and then set up an alert to trigger before the timeframe. This way, you’ll ensure you have ample time to read and respond to your customers within your average response time.

5. Use customer service response templates and text shortcuts

As I mentioned before, in a lot of cases it’s highly likely that a large percentage of your email communications will be about similar, if not As I mentioned before, in a lot of cases it’s highly likely that a large percentage of your email communications will be about similar, if not identical, problems. Having your customer service agents craft individual and unique responses to each of these inquiries is remarkably time-consuming. While you may value the human touch, the same level of customer support can be achieved in far more efficient ways. You can even attach articles that will answer your customer’s question. Publishing and updating your product’s FAQ and support page would be a great advantage in building templates. An unorthodox way to find templates that work is through an internet forum and websites that offer content marketing services.

Rather than drafting a new email for each and every customer inquiry, your support team should have access to a number of email templates or how-to guides covering the most common topics of inquiry. This allows them to pull up the template, input the relevant personal details, and add a casual and conversational extra, if it suits your brand’s tone of voice.

Use the experience of your agents to build a library of responses. Experienced agents know what type of questions their customers ask time after time. Use this information to better prepare your customer service team.

Not only will messaging templates speed up your response time, but they’ll also help you keep your communication consistent. This means that every customer will get the same answer to their question, with little or no deviation – helping to reinforce the brand and keep all your customers happy.

Of course, not every customer service query can be handled with a template. Another way to help make writing emails easier is to use text shortcuts.

For example, by assigning shortcuts to commonly used words or phrases, you can dramatically reduce the number of keystrokes needed to write an email response. You could also use shortcuts for other parts of the email, including:

Social media profile links
Links to FAQs or knowledge base
Email subscription copy and links

Text shortcuts or email templates can dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to answer an email, which in turn will allow you to respond to more emails and reduce your average response time.

6. Categorize, prioritize, and tag the emails you receive

As you know, not all customer inquiries are the same. Some are simply more important than others and should be treated as such.

For instance, it’s a good idea to prioritize responses from customers who are experiencing a recurring issue. As this is maybe the second or third time contact has been made regarding the same problem, the response must be more urgent. This may also be the case with particularly important customers or with those inquiries that require more time to resolve.

It is very tempting for agents to leave more complex issues for later and tackle the easy ones first. But if these are tagged as high-priority, they are more likely to be resolved in a time the customer finds acceptable. You can reassure the sender that their email has been read and that, due to the complex nature of an inquiry, a resolution may be slightly delayed.

While a range of tagging systems can be utilized to prioritize email communications, try using a system everyone understands. One of the quickest and easiest is the traffic light system:

Red for high priority
Amber for less urgent emails
Green for those that don’t require an immediate response

You can prioritize your inbound communications through a triage system, just like an emergency room. You can assess an email based on its subject or theme and assign it a tag accordingly.

Once you have the emails categorized and prioritized your team can then efficiently respond to each email based on one category at a time by order of priority. By concentrating on one topic or subject area at a time, major time-saving efficiencies can be made, compared to jumping between multiple topics which can be time-consuming and inefficient.

So, Ready to Improve Your Customer Service?

The sky’s the limit when it comes to how much you can do to improve your customer service. There is little reason why you wouldn’t want to implement these 6 best practices. Chatbots, automations and Simplr’s AI-powered features will help you be well on your way towards an efficient and effective customer service that will make happy customers in addition to helping reduce response time for everyone else in the company.

If all of this sounds daunting and you want help enacting these principles, let us know. With our help, you can easily meet your service-level agreement, build brand loyalty from awesome after-sales experience, have an organized methodology to train your agents, and have tons of resources on how to modernize your process. Our team of experts are ready and waiting to partner with you to help you create a stellar customer service management plan