10 Proven Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Response Time

Customer service response time is perhaps the most essential part of delivering a top-notch customer experience. It’s about how quickly you respond to inquiries, concerns or requests from customers. With so many businesses competing for the attention of potential customers, companies must find creative ways to stand out from the competition.

When customers reach out to you, it’s important that they receive a timely and helpful response. They won’t wait around forever, and if your customer service responses are slow or unhelpful, customers will take their business elsewhere.

The same goes for any other interactions your business has with customers. Whether it’s responding to inquiries on your website, providing information on an FAQ page, or processing orders; the way you handle these interactions has a significant impact on whether or not a customer or client decides to do business with your business in the future.

With so many businesses striving to achieve excellent customer service, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. But by focusing on improving your response times and creating a frictionless experience for your customers, you can give them an incentive to choose you over anyone else. Keep reading to learn 10 tips on how you can improve your customer service response time today!

In addition, a fast response time can help your business avoid negative reviews and other consequences of slow customer service response times.

In 2017, the average response time is just over one hour. Also, 67% of customers expect a response within an hour.

With all of these in mind, we’ve identified 10 ways to improve your customer service response time.

1. Be Transparent About Your Customer Service Hours

Customers browsing your website or reviewing your social media pages will want to know when they can expect to receive a response from you. Let your transparency be on display by openly sharing your customer service hours so customers don’t feel like you’re ignoring them.

If you want customers to take you serious as a business, you need to give them a reason to believe you’re an actual business with real people behind it. Letting customers know when they can expect a response will go a long way towards accomplishing this.

2. Have a Responsive Team and Environment

If you’re promising a 24-hour turnaround time on support requests, but your response times are averaging 48 hours, you’re doing your customers a disservice. While there may be extenuating circumstances you’re encountering that are causing the delay, it’s important to be upfront about them.

Customers don’t expect businesses to be perfect, but they do expect them to be consistent and reliable. If you want customers to view you as reliable, you need to have a responsive team and environment.

If you’re struggling to meet the response times you’ve committed to, let your customers know about it. Let them know what’s causing the delay, and when you would resolve it. Being upfront with customers and letting them know how you’re working to resolve the issue will go a long way toward building your reputation as a reliable business.

3. Omnichannel Customer Service

Omnichannel customer service connects several communication channels such as social media pages, calls, SMS, emails, etc., and brings it all into one platform. It is sometimes called Omnichannel Service Desk, Omnichannel Customer Support, or Omnichannel Customer Experience. 

The goal is to give your customers a consistent and unified experience across these different communication channels. In other words, irrespective of the communication channel a customer chooses to contact a business with, they can be sure to have the same smooth experience.

Omnichannel customer service goes beyond providing options for customers and agents to interact or communicate. It also automatically syncs all customer information, messages, notes, files, and other data, across all channels. This makes it easy for the customers and the customer support reps to seamlessly switch from one channel, device, and touchpoint to another during conversations.

Benefits of Omnichannel Customer Service

4. Train Your Employees

Empathy and respect and two key treatments that most customers want. While it’s not always possible, it’s important to strive towards the goal of treating your customers like you value them, and not like they are just another sale.

Treat Customers Like Humans with NotchCX Omnichannel Customer Service

If you’re providing subpar customer service, it’s important to acknowledge it and take steps to rectify it. Not only will this show customers that you’re aware of the issue, but it will also let them know that you care about providing a better experience.

If you have a training program in place, you and your employees will be able to identify and correct issues quickly and efficiently. This not only helps your employees improve but also shows customers that you truly care about providing a better experience for them.

Customers want to know that you’re treating them like individuals and striving to meet their needs. If you overwork and under care for your employees, it will show in their interactions with customers.

Here are important skills you should have as a customer service manager

5. Streamline Responses with Tech Tools

Depending on the type of business you operate, there are technologies you can use to streamline your customer service responses.

CRM softwares can handle incoming tickets or inquiries and give you useful customer insights. Smart Website Chatbots can respond to FAQs from your website. Customer service software can give you metrics on response times and help you take action when you’re falling behind on responses.

It’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest technology and be willing to invest in it when needed. It may seem like a lot of money, but it’s a small price to pay for a significant boost in your customer service response times.

6. Automate Repetitive Tasks

If you’re dealing with a large volume of inquiries, or you have a long-running FAQ page that needs regular updating, consider utilizing an AI platform. 

Many AI-powered virtual assistants can help you automate certain tasks. Doing so will free up your employees from having to take on these monotonous and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on the higher priority tasks. 

It will also help you streamline your business processes, freeing up valuable time that you can redirect to other areas of the business.

7. Add a Live Chat Functionality to your Marketing Strategies

Live chat is one of the best ways to improve your response times. It’s quick, easy to implement, and provides a significant boost to your response times. 

Depending on your industry, you can choose from a variety of different providers. For example, if you’re in eCommerce, you can use a tool like NotchCX’s smart Webchat tool.

8. Offer Customers a Self-Service Option

This is one of the popular customer service trends. Depending on the type of business you operate, you may be able to offer customers a self-service option. This will significantly reduce the amount of time you spend handling low-level inquiries and provide your employees with more time to focus on higher-level tasks.

It’s important to make sure that the self-service option is providing customers with the same level of quality as a human interaction would. If the self-service option is lacking, customers will likely feel like they’re missing out on something, creating an unfulfilling experience. It’s important to make sure the self-service option is as helpful as possible while staying out of the way for customers who don’t want to use it.

9. Integrate Your System

Integrating your systems is a great way to improve response time. When you integrate, you’re able to share data between the different systems. This allows for faster and more consistent responses across all of your channels.

One way that businesses can do this is by having a central location for their customer data so that it’s easy for employees at each level of an organization (like marketing, sales, or operations) to access the information they need to respond appropriately.

Another important aspect when considering integration strategies involves having one source of truth. A very good example of this is NotchCX CRM as you can easily integrate your other communication solutions with it.

10. Empower Customer Service Team with the Right Tools

If you want your employees to be able to provide excellent customer service, then they must have the right tools.

A robust CRM solution with the right functionalities will allow them to keep track of the information about each customer and their interactions with the company.

A helpdesk will allow for quick response times when someone calls in with a question or concern. It also allows for multi-tasking so that if someone has an issue while on another call, they can quickly respond without losing their train of thought or losing focus on solving their problem as quickly as possible before it escalates into something bigger than expected.

A customer portal should be available 24/7 so customers can interact with your business directly from any device at any time of day or night – no matter where they are located or what time zone they live in!

Conclusion

Customers want to feel appreciated, recognized and valued. If you want to succeed in the long run, you need to focus on improving your response times and creating a frictionless experience for your customers. When you focus on improving your response times, you’ll be able to provide customers with a better experience, and ultimately, increase your profits. With so many businesses striving to achieve excellent customer service, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. But by focusing on improving your response times and creating a frictionless experience for your customers, you can give them an incentive to choose you over anyone else.