How to drive Customer Satisfaction with lower response times

What do you think is an appropriate time frame to respond to customer inquiries? 24 hours? 48 hours? A week?

If you think any of those is an ideal response time, you’re in for a surprise.

41% of consumers (helpscout.net) expect an email response within 6 hours of sending their request, while only 21% see one business day as an acceptable waiting time.

Of customers using an online platform, 71% expect live assistance (liveperson.com) within 5 minutes of attempted contact. If they don’t receive assistance within their expected time frame, 48% will turn to another company.

Here are 3 quick tips to drive Customer Satisfaction with lower response times: ??

?? Build a strategy from peak usage data

Before you take any steps to boost flagging response times, it’s important to identify when and where your team is most needed.

You should collect enough data to answer the following questions:

• What are your peak hours for inquiries?
• What channels (phone, email, chat, social media) are most popular, and during which hours?

If most of your team answers phone calls, but your customers prefer opening a chat window, you should pull some team members from calls and put them to work on chat.

?? Manage expectations with Automatic Replies

If customers contact you with a problem, they’re likely to be upset and nervous about having their issue resolved quickly and fairly.?

So, it’s helpful to send them a confirmation email that their complaint has been received.

Don’t just send them a ticket number, though – address them by name, provide links to FAQs and other documentation, and give them an estimate of when they’ll hear from you.?

??? Keep your docs up to date

Do you know which customer requests take the least amount of time?

The ones that never happen, of course!

A well-written FAQ page and supporting help documentation can reduce the flood of questions aimed at your team.

By keeping track of recurring problems and complaints, you can write help guides and tutorials to bolster your website’s ‘help’ section.

Make sure it’s searchable and provide suggestions so that customers can easily find what they need.

Ultimately, improving your responsiveness is about juggling speed with quality. It’s never a good idea to cut time by discouraging empathetic, thorough responses.

By working to provide reliable service at a reasonable clip, you’re improving the overall experience your customers have, thereby increasing the likelihood they’ll keep doing business with you.