Last Updated: April 2024
Are you trying all your might to make your customers happy?
Make sure your customer service is responsive.
Customer service responsiveness simply refers to the time taken by the agent to initiate the action on the service request or a complaint put up by the customer and the total time taken till the resolution is achieved.
The fastest reply (First Time Response, FTR) to a customer’s complaint or service request is the key to successful CX.
You may wonder “What will happen if I don’t respond faster to my customer or rather don’t respond at all?”
An annual customer service study, conducted by the Superoffice found that 62% of companies do not respond to customer emails.
As a result,
- You lose your valuable customers
- You lose existing business and future prospects as well
- Decline in ROI
- Reputation in stake
- Brand positioning in question
So, it’s crucial for your customer service to be responsive and fast.
In this post, we will tell you:
Top customer responsiveness trends, and
9 best practices to improve customer service responsiveness
Customer responsiveness trends
Live Chat Support
“71% of customers expect brands to offer customer support over messaging channels” – Conversocial
Instant messaging or chat support seems to top the trends list for 2022. If you have adopted chatbots support in your customer service model, then you are already in the run to the top. But your chatbot support must be quick, effective, and most importantly problem-solving.
Personalized Customer Service
“66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.” – Salesforce
Customers these days hate to hear “company policy” citation. They expect to be attended to and treated as a person and not just as a case.
So, companies should understand this personalized responsive customer service expectation of the customers and make amendments to give them a fulfilling CX.
Video-Support System
“94% of customers rate video support as a positive experience”- Hubspot.com
Latest in the trend, ever since the pandemic started, where cities and countries had to follow stringent lockdown measures, is this convincing video support. This measure is not only adopted by the medical industry during these trying times, but other industries are also adopting this method in their Customer Responsive streamlines.
Automate Response System
Customers are always ready to welcome any evolving upgrades or changes in the industry. Nowadays they are getting used to quick automated response systems for tiny tasks like order acknowledgments, follow-up, etc. They even started preferring it to agents calling and giving them updates.
In fact, they are all running out of time and don’t want to waste even a few minutes or seconds on such slight matters.
9 Best practices to Improve Customer Service Responsiveness:
Catch-up with the Trend:
It is very important that you must always be updated and quick to adapt to the ever-changing trends in any industry, but foremostly in Customer Service.
If you are still stuck with age-old processes in this fast-emerging world, your brand is soon to be forgotten.
You can refer to the above-mentioned few of the latest emerging trends like Chatbots, Video-support, Automated-Response, Social-media, etc.
“Interactions with customer service via legacy channels like email and phone have fallen in the US by 7% in the last two years, according to new data shared with BI Intelligence from Aspect Software.”
Analytics:
Never ever forget to track your Customer Care response metrics.
Track all your analytical data as frequently as possible and implement necessary changes in your system. If your business has a presence on multiple channels, make sure that all the channels are connected to one Omnichannel support. Analyze all the Omnichannel metrics and KPIs, work on improving all the weak areas and develop your customer service responsiveness efficiency.
Oomph up your FRT
Zendesk’s research shows that having a low FRT creates more satisfied customers. It shows that satisfied customers spend 14% more according to an American Express survey.
Respond to customers timely. React to their requests or complaints immediately, act appropriately and boost your Response rate.
In a survey by Zingle, the No. 1 thing customers say would improve
the customer experience is “faster response times.”
Superoffice, For companies that do respond, the average response time is 12 hours – with the slowest response taking longer than 8 days!
Avoid customer’s Runaround time
Avoid keeping customers waiting, this will highly frustrate them. Provide personalized responsive customer service solutions, and go out of the way to support them.
Never make your customers run around for every single and simple need of theirs, citing your company policies. That’s a huge mistake you are committing.
You need to put yourself in customers’ shoes to understand their agony of being made to run around and be empathetic towards them. Bend or mend your ways to give the best CX experience.
Omnichannel support
You might have already incorporated an Omnichannel support system in your business, owing to the current trends in customer purchase behavior. You need to be active on all the customer touchpoints like your website, mobile application, retail store, social-media sites, etc, constantly.
Keep an eye on all the channels’ analytic data and ensure you attend to your customers’ requests, complaints, and feedback from all the channels promptly.
Respond to them back from the respective touchpoints. Make them feel that you are listening to them from all the doors.
Stay ahead of your Customer
Anticipate customers’ needs much before them and design your support channels suitably.
You know about your brand or product inside out. So once again wear your customer’s hat and think through all possible customer experiences with your brand even before your customer could.
Try to promulgate ways to reach out to customers at the right time with the right solution. It will amaze your customer and in return become connected to your brand, thereby increasing the loyalty ratio.
Follow-up
Follow-up is the trick.
97% of companies never follow up to see if the customer was satisfied with the response.
You don’t have to invest a lot to execute this. Just an email or an SMS is enough for the customers to update you on their satisfaction levels. But never neglect these responses, as they will give you the pivotal data for ranking your responsive customer service.
Use technology wisely
Automated Response systems like Chatbots and email bots are common these days. You can use these effectively in connecting with your customers at various stages of interactions with your brand.
- You can automatically message them on their order updates
- Send them automated ‘Thank you’ responses promptly
- Automated follow-ups
- Automated returns with integrated return center
All the above tasks seem to be very simple, yet time-consuming. And if you engage people only for these tasks, imagine the time and money put into these menial tasks, that are inevitable.
In such situations, you should use an AI-powered Helpdesk software like Saufter. Let it do these menial tasks for you. Thus, you will not miss out on these key data while you can concentrate on other business matters simultaneously.
Moreover, you will be able to provide quality customer service efficiently within a limited quantity of time with a combination of humans and technology. You can also quantify your responsive customer service target to reach maximizing CX satisfaction levels.
Listen to your customer
Surveys and feedback – Forget not to collect these precious data every now and then, study them, and understand your customers’ pain points or pleasure points.
Say, if one of your customers had suggested a modification on something, and if you think implementing it will work positively, then go ahead and execute it. And let that customer know that their feedback was honored.
This act of responsive customer service to customers’ feedback and acknowledgment matters hugely to them. In return, you will see wonders in numbers of customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and word-of-mouth marketing.
According to a study by the University of Michigan, companies with the happiest customers gained in value by 75% over 5 years Vs just a 19% gain over 5 years for companies on the same Index with average customer satisfaction levels.
Conclusion
All the above-mentioned practices are quite necessary to achieve your objective of a high CX success rate.
You can also leverage these tasks to an extended team of professionals like at Helplama. You can avail of their fully managed customer support systems, automated response systems, live chat support, and other smart AI integrations and can save half of your invaluable productivity time spent on menial responding tasks by your agents.
