what is the ability to respond with little penalty in time cost or customer value

Post summary:

• The most important attribute of good customer service, according to customers' themselves, is a fast response time. How speedily do you respond to your ain customers?

• Co-ordinate to our own research of ane,000 companies, the average response time to respond to customer service requests is 12 hours and 10 minutes. That'south as well long! And so, how can you reduce response times?

• We share 5 of the most constructive and easy-to-implement techniques that we utilize at SuperOffice, which helped us reduce our own response fourth dimension from more than than v hours per reply to at present less than i hour.

Your customers are the source of your revenue.

Without them, yous don't accept much of a business – so it's important to continue them happy.

Yet, in our almanac client service written report, we constitute that 62% of companies do not reply to client emails.

It's articulate that you lot accept an opportunity to stand out against the competition by simply responding to your customers.

For companies that do respond, the boilerplate response fourth dimension is 12 hours – with the slowest response taking longer than viii days!

Together with Jeff Toister, we recently asked iii,200 consumers how quickly they expect companies to respond to their electronic mail.

The event? Nearly half of all of customers (46%) expect companies to respond faster than 4 hours.

While 12% expect a response inside 15 minutes or less.

There'southward conspicuously a mis-match hither.

Do y'all know how long does information technology take for you to respond to your customers?

To reply that question, you need to calculate your first response fourth dimension (FRT).

What is average first response time (FRT)?

Average starting time response time is one of the virtually important customer service reports used to understand how you are performing. Information technology looks at non just the i-off response for a single customer, only the average response time for your unabridged department.

Reducing response times and responding to your customers with helpful and relevant information is the key to client service success!

Therefore, if yous want to improve the experience for your customers, and then you need to make reducing your boilerplate FRT a priority for your business.

And then, how do I calculate average FRT?

To understand how to calculate your average FRT, there are two key pieces of information you need to collect from your customer service team:

1. The total time it took to reply to emails during a selected time menstruum.
2. The total number of responses sent in that selected time period.

Make sure the fourth dimension period for both metrics matches. You lot may desire to look at this over the course of a twenty-four hours, a calendar week, or even a calendar month to become a articulate motion picture.

Then, simply carve up the height figure (full time to transport responses) by the bottom effigy (total number of responses). This volition give you a unmarried number of hours, which is your average FRT.

For SuperOffice Service customers, FRT is calculated automatically – meaning less piece of work for y'all and your team!

Here, you can find the average response time by reporting period, by department or team and by individual agents.

If you're not a SuperOffice client, and so here's how you lot can calculate your boilerplate FRT.

Allow's imagine you send 3 customer service emails per twenty-four hour period.

The first email takes ii hours, the second takes 4 hours, and the third takes 6 hours. Collectively, information technology takes yous 12 hours to respond to all 3 emails. Now, divide 12 hours by the iii emails yous sent and you lot end up with an average response fourth dimension of 4 hours.

If you calculate that your boilerplate response time is four hours, then – job well done!

However, if it takes your team longer than the boilerplate to respond, then it might exist time to examine how to amp up team piece of work and find new ways to improve your processes, and so y'all can reduce response times and keep your customers happy.

But, practice fast response times really matter?

Yes, they do, and hither'due south why.

Why speed matters in client service

Let's start with the obvious – a fast response makes your customers feel important.

Second, speed matters in customer service considering your customers demand it!

CMO council found that the most of import attribute of a good customer experience, co-ordinate to the customers' themselves, is afast response time.

Therefore, responding chop-chop means you're coming together client expectations.

What happens when a company takes besides long to answer and doesn't meet expectations?

They stop doing business with you lot.

Personally, I prefer a response within 15 minutes - no more than than an hour maximum.

If they don't reply, I'll find a new company to do business with (if possible). Slow response times definitely leave a bad impression for any future business organization. David Bailey-Lauring, CEO at Blu Mint Digital

Calculation to that, a survey from Hiver plant that 70% of consumers say they will advise their friends confronting buying a product or service afterward a negative service experience.

Sadly, too few companies prioritize fast response times.

While Net Promoter Score and other client success metrics remain popular, a study by Telephone call Centre Helper plant that only 12% of client service managers are focused on responding apace to their customers.

If meeting customer expectations isn't enough to persuade y'all of how important information technology is, perhaps some other statement will practise the trick? The third reason for why speed matters is that if yous don't reply quickly, your customers will contact you through another channel – essentially doubling your workload!

The Northridge Group'southward State of Customer Service Experience Study found that 40% of millennials (today'due south decision makers) wait hour before they effort to contact y'all in another aqueduct.

Responding quickly means less piece of work for yous and your squad, so you tin can spend more than time on writing quality responses.

Finally, responding apace to your customers will grow your business.

A written report of more than 500,000 interactions found that customers are willing to spend more than with a concern that responds chop-chop to their enquiry. But put,a fast response generates higher revenue.

How to reduce customer service response times

In that location's a direct business benefit to reducing response times.

To assistance yous get started, we've collected 5 of the nigh effective and easy-to-implement techniques that you lot can use to respond quickly to your customers.

i. Implement customer service software

Practice you use customer service software?

If not, then at present is the time to consider information technology.

If your company yet uses a shared access mailbox to manage hundreds (or fifty-fifty thousands) of customer service emails, in that location's no easier mode to improve your client service processes than to invest in and implement customer service software.

Customer service software stores every single conversation or interaction y'all've had during your company'due south relationship with your customer. This ways you can await back and empathize their problems, identify details of the products they're subscribing to and use this information to be more helpful in your response.

On top of this, using the correct tools for the task ways y'all'll exist much faster than you would be trying to piece together all this information from a shared inbox or other similar low-tech approach.

2. Utilize email autoresponders

Sometimes, all a client needs to know is that their email has been received and that aid is on the style. It'south only when their concerns, issues or complaints take gone ignored that negative sentiment begins to announced and potentially affect your long-term relationship with the customer.

A corking way to overcome this is to use email autoresponders.

Less than 10% of companies utilise autoresponders, merely this simple, age-old technology can be used to permit a client know you lot have received their email and what they should expect to happen side by side.

You can also use this opportunity to outline things similar:

• Thanking them for their message. This way, they know you're taking their advice seriously and paying it the respect they deserve.
• Opening hours of your customer service department. By including this, they know that if they email in the center of the nighttime or on a weekend, that it might take several hours (or even days), until their electronic mail is seen by someone.
• Average response times. Informing your customers of when they tin expect a response sets expectations upfront. Plus, including a timeframe volition take the pressure level off your customer service team by avoiding follow-up inquiries.
• Links to FAQs / instruction manuals. No matter how easy to utilise you lot recollect your website is, your customers won't always notice documents like FAQs or manuals. Sometimes, all they need is a gentle nudge in the right direction, and through cocky-service they could end upward solving their problem before y'all get the chance to reply.

3. Use time-based email alerts

Although we aim to respond to every customer service email, sometimes emails can go left behind.

For example, you could be waiting for some data earlier you tin respond in full, or perchance there're more emails in the client service queue than y'all expected. Whatever the reason, your customers deserve your attention within a reasonable timeframe.

To avoid losing emails in the system or response times being delayed for much longer than they need to exist, try setting up time-based electronic mail alerts.

For companies that utilise a shared access mailbox, this will have to be done manually.

However, if you lot use client service software, you can set this up automatically and tag new emails with a timer. Simply work out how quickly yous would similar to answer to your customers and and so set up up an warning to trigger earlier the timeframe. This way, you lot'll ensure you accept ample time to read and respond to your customers within your boilerplate response time.

4. Use templates + text shortcuts

Experienced agents know what type of questions their customers ask time later on time. Use this information to make certain your website and help documentation reverberate these types of questions. And you can also apply it to improve set your client service team.

Rather than making your squad repeatedly come with custom responses to the same questions, you tin supply them with customer service email templates to aid make their job easier. Not only will it speed up your response fourth dimension, but it'll also help you lot keep your communication consistent.

This ways that every customer will get the same reply to their question, with little or no deviation – helping to reinforce the brand and keep all your customers happy.

Of course, not every customer service query can exist handled with a template.

Some other way to assistance make writing emails easier is to utilise text shortcuts.

For example, by assigning shortcuts to ordinarily used words or phrases, you can dramatically reduce the number of keystrokes needed to write an electronic mail response.

Here's how it could work: with the shortcuts updating automatically once the email has been sent, based on your settings.

Simple, but very effective!

The more than times you use the same shortcut, the quicker information technology will be to type up a response.

You could also use shortcuts for other parts of the email, including:

• Social media contour links,
• Links to FAQs or knowledge base,
• Electronic mail subscription copy and links.

Text shortcuts or email templates can dramatically reduce the corporeality of time needed to answer an email, which in turn will allow you to respond to more emails and reduce your average response time.

5. Categorize and prioritize the emails yous receive

One of the best ways to speed up the way you lot answer customer service emails is to categorize and prioritize the emails you receive.

When a new electronic mail is received, it should go through a 'triage' system – just like a patient would in a infirmary emergency room. You tin assess an email based on its subject area or theme and assign it a tag accordingly. Different tags should have dissimilar levels of priority based on criteria such as time needed to reply, complexity of the problem, and the importance to both the customer and the business.

For example, we prioritize responding to sales ready leads (free trial and demo requests) over general enquiries as enquiry has shown that 90% of leads go cold within an 60 minutes. All tickets that match this priority will move to the elevation of the queue. Alternatively, you can find all prioritized tickets using the search role (equally shown below).

Once yous have the emails categorized and prioritized your team tin then efficiently answer to each email based on one category at a time by order of priority. Past concentrating on one topic or subject area area at a time, major time saving efficiencies can be made, compared to jumping betwixt multiple topics which can exist fourth dimension-consuming and inefficient.

A response fourth dimension within i hour?

We reached out to Stein Ove Sektnan, managing director of customer service at SuperOffice, to get his input on how to reduce response times.

Hither's what he had to say:

Request your Customer Success team to respond quickly might sound easy plenty, but the more than you focus on speed, rather than quality, the more likely y'all are to lower the quality of service you lot provide to your customers.

When it comes to response times, here's what you should call back about:

Define what a reply is. A fast answer is not helpful if the respond doesn't add together value.

Client service is a squad effort. Cherry-picking the easy requests might help individuals respond speedily, but it doesn't aid reach the squad's goals.

Share (and develop) knowledge beyond the team. When the workload spikes, whether due to seasonality, annual leave or sickness, having shared expertise across the team gives you the flexibility to handle an increment customer requests.

Some 5 years ago our customer service team`s response time reduced from an boilerplate of v hours to less than one hour. Since then, the boilerplate response time of SuperOffice Customer Back up team has remained the same.

Determination

Reducing your client service response time is incredibly of import.

Not but can it help you brand your customers happy and enhance your make'southward reputation – but when washed properly, information technology can likewise amend efficiencies throughout your entire organization.

Yet, with the average response taking more than than 12 hours, information technology's clear that many companies could be doing more to reduce this figure.

If you're looking to amend customer service, and so think these 5 easy-to-implement techniques to help prepare your company apart equally an organization that values your customers:

1. Implement customer service software to make your inbox more manageable.
2. Employ electronic mail autoresponders to keep your customers in the loop and manage expectations.
3. Utilize fourth dimension-based alerts to make sure no emails get missing or are delayed.
4. Utilize templates and text shortcuts to reduce the time information technology takes to write each email.
5. Categorize all incoming customer service emails and reply based on priority.

To find out more about our annual customer service benchmark report and how 1,000 companies respond to customer service emails, download the report for free.

Customer Service

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Source: https://www.superoffice.com/blog/response-times/

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