Discover the art of swift customer service. Uncover five effective strategies to significantly cut down response times, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Let's delve into the world of efficient customer service and explore how to make it a reality for your business.
How to reduce response times
The most important attribute of good customer service is a fast response time
- 62% of companies do not respond to customer emails, and the average response time is 12 hours and 10 minutes
- You can stand out against the competition by simply responding to your customers
A response time within one hour?
Focus on speed, rather than quality, the more likely you are to lower the quality of service you provide to your customers
- Define what a reply is
- Share (and develop) knowledge across the team
- By following the tips shared in this article, our customer service team response rates have reduced from an average of 5 hours to now less than 1 hour
What is average first response time (FRT)?
Reducing response times and responding to your customers with helpful and relevant information is the key to customer service success.
- Calculate the average FRT by dividing the total time it took to respond to emails during a selected time period and the total number of responses sent in that time period to get a clear picture of how the customer service team is performing.
Time-Based Email Alerts
To avoid losing emails in the system or response times being delayed for much longer than they need to be, try setting up time-based email alerts.
- 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, respond, and learn from your customers.
Why speed matters in customer service
A fast response makes your customers feel important
- Your customers expect demand it
- If you don’t respond quickly, your customers will contact you through another channel – doubling your workload
- Responding quickly means less work for you and your team, so you can spend more time on writing quality responses
- Growing your business
- Customers are willing to spend more with a business that responds quickly
Categorize and Prioritize the emails you receive
Assess an email based on its subject or theme and assign a tag accordingly
- Different tags should have different levels of priority based on criteria such as time needed to respond, complexity of the problem, and importance of the customer and the business
- Once you have the emails categorized and prioritized, your team can then efficiently respond to each email by focusing on one category at a time
Conclusion
Reducing your customer service response time is incredibly important. Not only can it help you make your customers happy and enhance your brand’s reputation, it can also improve efficiencies throughout your entire organization.
- Implement customer service software to make your inbox more manageable
- Use email autoresponders to keep your customers in the loop and manage expectations
- Time-based alerts to make sure no emails go missing or are delayed
- Categorize all incoming customer service emails and respond based on priority
Implement customer service software
Customer service software stores every conversation or interaction you’ve had during your company’s relationship with your customer.
- This means you can look back and understand their problems, identify details of the products they’re subscribing to, and use this information to be more helpful in your response.
Use email autoresponders
Let customers know you have received their email and what they should expect to happen next.
- Include opening hours of your customer service department, thank them for their message, and include a timeframe for when they can expect a response.
