Speed is one of the determining factors of good customer service. According to research by HubSpot, 90% of customers consider an "immediate" response as essential or very important when they have an enquiry. 60% of customers consider an “immediate” response as 10 minutes or less. Simply put, customer service teams that respond faster earn the favour of the customers.
But how do you support your customer service team and improve their response times? Here are a few recommendations to consider.
1. Make sure to leverage automatic response
Set up an automatic response after a customer sends an enquiry whether through chat, SMS or email. Automatic responses consist of generic message templates that add nothing unique to the question that was asked, but informs the customers that you are addressing the issue and that you’ll be sending a more specific response soon.
Take note that automatic responses do not count as first responses, but it somehow reassures your customers or clients that their requests or enquiries are being looked at.
To further improve your automatic response, you can introduce your clients to your self-service capabilities by providing them with a link to your knowledge base and FAQ pages. This might even enable them to handle the problem on their own and get in touch again only when professional assistance is required.
2. Reduce concerns with a comprehensive knowledge base
According to a recent survey, more than 90% of clients prefer helpful knowledge bases to phone conversations. This demonstrates that clients don't necessarily want or need to speak with the customer support department each time they have a service request. They are content to be led to the appropriate solutions.
Your help desk and knowledge base should be integrated and designed in a way that customers will automatically see related articles in a drop-down list as they type their issue. As a result, you’re likely to receive fewer incoming tickets. A backlog of tickets usually causes poor response times so this will definitely help manage your customer service team’s time.
3. Prepare responses for commonly asked questions
To reduce customer service response time, prepare canned responses or pre-written answers to typical questions. To create customised prepared responses for a wide range of common tickets, use your event logs and support data. Remember that each company is unique, so default email templates are frequently useless. Add value to your customers and clients and shorten the time it takes to address a problem by taking the time to carefully craft the ideal canned answer templates that are specific to your business.
Consider the scenario where you receive numerous shipping tickets and the first step is to get the customer's order number. To gather this information, you can program a scripted answer, which will prepare the ticket for resolution when a customer support agent intervenes.
4. Organise enquiries by priority
Every enquiry has value. However, not all enquiries are urgent. So be sure to ask your customer service teams to sort your enquiries into categories according to impact, complexity, and the amount of time needed to address them.
Your support team members will have the option to address tickets based on the similarity of the subject matter or difficulty level after you've prioritised them. As a result of their recent experience with a comparable problem, this facilitates the resolution of enquiries and increases productivity. You can use a round-robin algorithm or a load-balanced distribution depending on agent availability to automatically assign tickets after categorising them.
5. Distribute support volume on different channels
Every enquiry is different; some require a customer support specialist to resolve, while others could benefit from a straightforward knowledge base article. Time and effort will be saved by classifying the issues and sending them to the appropriate channels.
With the aid of an omnichannel help desk software, you can provide customers a variety of channels for communication, decentralising enquiries and reducing overcrowding on specific channels.
Omnichannel support has the huge benefit of allowing clients to select the channel that works best for them. Would you prefer not to call an agent? They can use the chatbot. Want quick answers? They may continue using live chat.
6. Automate tasks
There are numerous manual touchpoints involved in resolving a ticket, including changing the status, prioritising, alerting the customer, starting follow-ups, and more. For each new ticket that comes in, you may automate these processes and gradually cut down on time. By removing the need for human activities, automating your help desk tickets will also help you lower overall costs incurred each ticket.
7. Use chatbots to offer round-the-clock support
You should always be alert for any questions so that you can respond right away. For a time-constrained support team, such is neither feasible nor reasonable. Fortunately, there are other options. For every ticket you receive on the weekends, on vacations, or in the wee hours of the morning, you can use a chatbot as your initial point of contact.
