Customer Service

How to reduce customer response times

By 14 de julio de 2022No Comments

Delivers an exceptional experience by reducing customer response times. It avoids government penalties for waiting on the phone longer than is prudent.

Your customers demand fast and accurate responses. Most of them are willing to spend more with companies that respond quickly, but 62% of brands fail to respond to customer service emails or leave them waiting in line for too long. It’s surprising that so many organizations don’t realize the risks of ignoring their most valuable asset.

Moreover, forcing them to wait has a huge impact on their satisfaction, not to mention that in many countries laws are starting to be created to prohibit it, such as in Spain, where draft legislation states that the waiting time to be attended to by telephone in information, complaint and after-sales services will be limited to three minutes. “No more (…) practically infinite waiting times that produce frustration”, said Alberto Garzón, Minister of Consumer Affairs, at a press conference.

And like Spain, there are many other countries that are beginning to bet or have been doing so for some time, on the protection of customers’ rights and their satisfaction with brands. What a curiosity that it is a law that forces companies to treat their customers better when it should be a strategy of its own.

1. Strengthen your digital channels:

Often, customers don’t want to contact the company, they just want an answer to their query. They are willing to use digital channels, such as web self-service if it solves their problem. Additionally, if the customer wants to expand their query, they can do so by requesting the assistance of a human agent.

Diverting queries in this way offers three key advantages:

  • The customer will be happy because they got the information they needed.
  • They can get answers 24/7 without having to wait for the contact center to be open.
  • By diverting ordinary queries, the overall call volume is reduced, allowing agents to spend more time on more complex queries.

2. Use ranking to prioritize

Every interaction that takes place is important to the customer. However, some are more urgent than others. For example, if we talk about when a tenant contacts your real estate company to arrange a regular check-up of their boiler. Clearly, this need is not as urgent as if the same tenant calls to say that his boiler has stopped working in the middle of winter.

Companies are advised to use a system of ranking and prioritizing the interactions they receive to deal with the most important queries first.

This can be through IVR or by using AI to analyze digital communications for keywords or terms that meet specific criteria. In this way, queries can be dealt with in a predefined order, based on their urgency.

3. Helps agents become more efficient to reduce customer response times

Reducing the time agents spend on each query has two benefits. It increases FCR rates, which has a direct impact on customer satisfaction while allowing agents more time to handle a greater number of inquiries. This ensures faster responses for a greater number of people. Empowering agents also increase their job satisfaction, which contributes to improved retention rates.

Examples of how to improve agent support include the following:

  • Provide a lo that will allow them to find relevant and consistent information when they are on a call with a customer or when handling a digital query.
  • Providing templates and pre-designed responses to common queries that they can easily customize and send. By using AI to analyze incoming digital queries, you can even automatically provide the most appropriate template to the agent when they are responding to emails, without them having to search for it.
  • Apply text shortcuts for commonly used words or phrases, such as signatures or terms and conditions. This speeds up response time and ensures greater consistency.
  • Automatically link to other business systems, such as CRM, so that agents have access to complete customer records, giving them context and a full history of past interactions. This results in reduced call times.

4. Enable collaboration across the enterprise

Managing complex queries often involves receiving information or input from back-office experts. Using collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, agents can automatically contact these experts, for example via chat and presence indicators, in real-time to resolve customer queries more quickly. This increases FCR rates and enables them to successfully handle more inquiries.

5. Implement an omnichannel strategy

More and more customers want to use different channels to contact the company, taking into account the nature and urgency of their query. Instead of forcing them to pick up the phone, for example, you can offer the possibility of using other channels.

In addition to self-service options, consider chatbots to generate automated responses, live chat instead of the phone, or even messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, to provide direct contact.

Omni-channel not only improves customer satisfaction but also decentralizes customer service. Instead of a few channels being overwhelmed by large volumes of queries, the load is spread across them.

This will make it easier to provide a quick response. Training agents to work on multiple channels also means that resources can be shared easily, as advisors switch immediately to the channels where they are most needed at the time.

If you want to offer successful customer service, you have to reduce customer response times

Customers expect response times to continue to fall and will compare you to the best, whatever your industry. This means you must always be looking for ways to improve, taking advantage of technology and different techniques to deliver the speed customers want.

However, keep in mind that customers will not trade speed for quality. You have to be faster and respond accurately to their questions. Improvement is an ongoing process, but the results are clear when it comes to happier customers, more efficient operations, and higher sales.

Would you like to be able to implement this strategy? Schedule a FREE consultation with one of our experts.

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