There’s a lot that you and your team need to focus on to achieve business success. From admin to finance and beyond, there’s a lot to consider, and it can feel overwhelming. That’s why business owners need to prioritize. One crucial area is customer service. If you skimp on that, then you won’t have any business left to manage.
As part of your customer service offering, you always need to ensure that you can respond to clients promptly. If you cannot get back to a prospective customer quickly, there is a chance that they could take their business elsewhere.
To help business owners who are unsure about how to respond promptly, here are some of the things you can do to improve your company’s response times.
The Best Ways to Improve Response Time for Clients
Establish a Target
One of the first things you should do is establish a target for your employees to meet. For example, you might want to keep response times under an hour. You need to ensure that your employees know that this is a target that you intend to meet. Communication is critical here, as it can help set your expectations for your workers so they can arrange their working days as best they can.
It would help if you also publicized your response times on your website and social media. Make it a key selling point of your business to incentivize customers to use you. If you claim that you can respond in a few hours and deliver on that promise, you will find many willing to work with you. However, make sure that your advertised response times are achievable; if you can’t live up to your promise, then clients will quickly be disappointed.
Set Up Automatic Responses
A great approach that you could use to speed up response times is to set up automated responses. Your software provider will send out a response as soon as someone gets in touch with you. You can do this through both a chat function like Facebook Messenger or through emails and other systems. Take a look at some email templates to get an idea about how this might look. You can then find the style of auto-response that works for you.
Using automatic responses, it is a small reassurance to the customer that their query has got to you. If you don’t have one, there is a chance that they could send message after message until they do get a response. A small note to say that you will get to them as soon as possible is all you need.
Add a Live Chat Widget
If you notice that you are getting a lot of messages about small things, or queries that could be dealt with efficiently, it might be worth looking into a live chat widget. This solution can easily be added to your website and allows customers who have these small queries to reach out to you.
You can even find live chats nowadays that are powered by artificial intelligence. While there is a chance that a problem needs to be sent on to a customer service representative, the live chat might also be able to work out a solution with the customer.
It is a neat little feature that is well worth investigating. They are usually easy to install and could save your team a lot of time dealing with small issues via email.
Hire More Customer Service Staff
If your business is growing, then your customer service team needs to expand too. While automation can help to some extent, there’s no replacement for human contact and support. As such, you should consider adding more team members to help your business respond to queries faster and offer a better overall customer experience.
Finding new staff can be challenging, so consider working with a recruitment agency or searching for freelance customer service staff online. You could then offer them full-time work if they fit in well at your company and are willing to work for you.
Many freelancers enjoy the freedom that this style of employment brings. However, others might be tempted by the benefits that in-house work offers, such as paid holidays, sick leave, and more.
Conclusion
Improving customer response time overall is incredibly essential and can have some fantastic benefits for your business. If you think your response times lag a little, it is time that you make some changes. Look for some easy improvements, and consider adding automation to the mix in some way.
You could soon have a much speedier response overall and much happier clients. Use these tips to find the best ways to improve your response times and generally give your clients a better experience when they work with your business. Likewise, there are other factors to consider such as using technology to improve your customer experience.
