Process Did Not Respond Within the Expected Timeframe
Post summary:
- The most important attribute of good customer service, according to customers' themselves, is a fast response time. How rapidly do you respond to your ain customers?
- According to our own enquiry of 1,000 companies, the average response time to reply to customer service requests is 12 hours and 10 minutes. That's besides long! And so, how can you reduce response times?
- We share 5 of the most effective and easy-to-implement techniques that we use at SuperOffice, which helped us reduce our own response time from more than 5 hours per reply to at present less than i hour.
Your customers are the source of your acquirement.
Without them, yous don't have much of a concern – and then information technology's important to go on them happy.
Yet, in our almanac customer service study, we plant that 62% of companies do not respond to client emails.
It's clear that y'all accept an opportunity to stand out against the competition by simply responding to your customers.
For companies that do respond, the average response time is 12 hours – with the slowest response taking longer than 8 days!
Together with Jeff Toister, we recently asked iii,200 consumers how quickly they expect companies to reply to their email.
The result? Nearly half of all of customers (46%) expect companies to respond faster than four hours.
While 12% expect a response within 15 minutes or less.
There'due south conspicuously a mis-lucifer here.
Practice you lot know how long does it take for you lot to reply to your customers?
To reply that question, you need to calculate your first response time (FRT).
What is average outset response time (FRT)?
Average start response time is one of the virtually important customer service reports used to understand how you are performing. It looks at non just the ane-off response for a single customer, but the average response time for your entire department.
Reducing response times and responding to your customers with helpful and relevant information is the key to customer service success!
Therefore, if you lot want to meliorate the experience for your customers, then you need to make reducing your average FRT a priority for your business.
So, how do I summate average FRT?
To understand how to calculate your boilerplate FRT, there are two key pieces of data you need to collect from your client service squad:
- The full time it took to reply to emails during a selected time flow.
- The total number of responses sent in that selected time menses.
Make certain the time period for both metrics matches. You may want to look at this over the class of a day, a calendar week, or even a month to become a articulate movie.
And so, only divide the top effigy (total fourth dimension to send responses) by the bottom figure (total number of responses). This will requite you a single number of hours, which is your average FRT.
For SuperOffice Service customers, FRT is calculated automatically – meaning less piece of work for you and your team!
Here, you can discover the average response time by reporting flow, by department or team and by individual agents.
If you lot're not a SuperOffice client, then here'south how you can calculate your average FRT.
Let'south imagine you send three client service emails per day.
The kickoff email takes two hours, the 2nd takes 4 hours, and the third takes 6 hours. Collectively, information technology takes you 12 hours to respond to all iii emails. At present, divide 12 hours by the 3 emails you sent and you end up with an boilerplate response time of four hours.
If y'all calculate that your average response time is 4 hours, then – task well washed!
However, if it takes your team longer than the boilerplate to respond, then it might exist fourth dimension to examine how to amp up team work and detect new ways to improve your processes, so y'all can reduce response times and go on your customers happy.
But, exercise fast response times really matter?
Aye, they practice, and here's why.
Why speed matters in customer service
Permit's start with the obvious – a fast response makes your customers experience important.
2nd, speed matters in customer service because your customers demand it!
CMO council found that the most important aspect of a skillful client experience, co-ordinate to the customers' themselves, is afast response fourth dimension.
Therefore, responding quickly means you're meeting customer expectations.
What happens when a visitor takes as well long to reply and doesn't meet expectations?
They stop doing business concern with you.
Personally, I adopt a response within 15 minutes - no more than than an hr maximum.
If they don't respond, I'll observe a new company to do business organization with (if possible). Slow response times definitely leave a bad impression for any future business organisation. David Bailey-Lauring, CEO at Blu Mint Digital
Calculation to that, a survey from Hiver found that 70% of consumers say they will advise their friends against buying a production or service after a negative service experience.
Sadly, besides few companies prioritize fast response times.
While Net Promoter Score and other customer success metrics remain pop, a study by Call Centre Helper plant that only 12% of customer service managers are focused on responding quickly to their customers.
If meeting customer expectations isn't plenty to persuade you of how important it is, mayhap another argument will do the trick? The third reason for why speed matters is that if you don't reply quickly, your customers will contact you through some other aqueduct – essentially doubling your workload!
The Northridge Grouping's State of Client Service Experience Study found that 40% of millennials (today's conclusion makers) wait 60 minutes before they try to contact y'all in another aqueduct.
Responding quickly means less work for you and your squad, and so you lot tin can spend more time on writing quality responses.
Finally, responding quickly to your customers will grow your business.
A report of more than 500,000 interactions plant that customers are willing to spend more with a concern that responds quickly to their enquiry. Simply put,a fast response generates college revenue.
How to reduce customer service response times
In that location'south a direct business do good to reducing response times.
To assist y'all go started, we've collected 5 of the most effective and easy-to-implement techniques that you tin use to respond rapidly to your customers.
one. Implement customer service software
Exercise you lot employ customer service software?
If non, so now is the time to consider it.
If your company still uses a shared access mailbox to manage hundreds (or even thousands) of customer service emails, there'southward no easier way to improve your customer 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's relationship with your customer. This ways you can look back and empathise their problems, identify details of the products they're subscribing to and employ this data to be more helpful in your response.
On top of this, using the right tools for the job ways y'all'll be much faster than you would exist trying to piece together all this information from a shared inbox or other like low-tech approach.
ii. Utilise email autoresponders
Sometimes, all a client needs to know is that their email has been received and that help is on the fashion. It's but when their concerns, issues or complaints accept gone ignored that negative sentiment begins to appear and potentially bear upon your long-term relationship with the customer.
A groovy fashion to overcome this is to employ email autoresponders.
Less than 10% of companies apply autoresponders, but this simple, historic period-old engineering science tin can be used to permit a customer know you lot have received their email and what they should expect to happen next.
Y'all can also use this opportunity to outline things similar:
- Thanking them for their bulletin. This style, they know yous're taking their communication seriously and paying it the respect they deserve.
- Opening hours of your client service section. By including this, they know that if they electronic mail in the middle of the nighttime or on a weekend, that information technology might take several hours (or even days), until their email is seen by someone.
- Average response times. Informing your customers of when they can wait a response sets expectations upfront. Plus, including a timeframe will take the pressure level off your client service team by avoiding follow-upwardly inquiries.
- Links to FAQs / instruction manuals. No matter how like shooting fish in a barrel to apply yous think your website is, your customers won't always find documents like FAQs or manuals. Sometimes, all they need is a gentle nudge in the right direction, and through self-service they could cease upwards solving their problem before you go the run a risk to reply.
three. Utilise time-based email alerts
Although we aim to respond to every client service email, sometimes emails can go left behind.
For example, you could be waiting for some data before yous tin respond in full, or perhaps in that location're more emails in the customer service queue than you expected. Whatever the reason, your customers deserve your attending within a reasonable timeframe.
To avert losing emails in the organisation or response times being delayed for much longer than they need to be, try setting up time-based email alerts.
For companies that use a shared access mailbox, this will have to be done manually.
Still, if you utilize customer service software, you can set this upward automatically and tag new emails with a timer. But work out how quickly you lot would like to reply to your customers and so prepare up an alert to trigger before the timeframe. This manner, y'all'll ensure you have ample time to read and answer to your customers inside your average response time.
iv. Use templates + text shortcuts
Experienced agents know what type of questions their customers ask fourth dimension afterward time. Use this information to make certain your website and help documentation reflect these types of questions. And you tin can besides employ it to meliorate prepare your client service team.
Rather than making your team repeatedly come up up with custom responses to the aforementioned questions, yous can supply them with customer service email templates to assistance brand their job easier. Not only volition it speed up your response time, but it'll also help y'all go on your communication consistent.
This means that every customer volition become the same respond to their question, with petty or no deviation – helping to reinforce the make and keep all your customers happy.
Of course, not every customer service query can be handled with a template.
Another style to assistance make writing emails easier is to use text shortcuts.
For example, past assigning shortcuts to commonly used words or phrases, yous can dramatically reduce the number of keystrokes needed to write an electronic mail response.
Here's how it could piece of work: with the shortcuts updating automatically one time the email has been sent, based on your settings.
Simple, but very constructive!
The more times y'all use the same shortcut, the quicker information technology will be to type up a response.
You could besides utilise shortcuts for other parts of the email, including:
- Social media profile links,
- Links to FAQs or knowledge base,
- Email subscription re-create and links.
Text shortcuts or email templates can dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to answer an email, which in plough will allow you to respond to more emails and reduce your average response time.
five. Categorize and prioritize the emails you receive
1 of the best ways to speed upward the mode you reply customer service emails is to categorize and prioritize the emails you receive.
When a new email is received, it should get through a 'triage' system – just similar a patient would in a infirmary emergency room. You can assess an electronic mail based on its subject or theme and assign it a tag appropriately. Different tags should have unlike levels of priority based on criteria such as fourth dimension needed to respond, complication of the problem, and the importance to both the customer and the business.
For example, we prioritize responding to sales gear up leads (free trial and demo requests) over full general enquiries as research has shown that ninety% of leads get cold within an hour. All tickets that friction match this priority volition move to the superlative of the queue. Alternatively, you lot tin can detect all prioritized tickets using the search function (equally shown below).
Once you have the emails categorized and prioritized your team can then efficiently respond to each email based on one category at a time past club of priority. Past concentrating on one topic or subject expanse at a time, major time saving efficiencies can be made, compared to jumping betwixt multiple topics which can be time-consuming and inefficient.
A response time 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.
Here'south what he had to say:
Asking your Customer Success team to reply rapidly might sound easy plenty, just the more you focus on speed, rather than quality, the more likely you are to lower the quality of service you provide to your customers.
When it comes to response times, here's what yous should recollect about:
Define what a respond is. A fast reply is not helpful if the respond doesn't add value.
Customer service is a team effort. Ruddy-picking the easy requests might assist individuals respond chop-chop, but it doesn't help achieve the squad'due south goals.
Share (and develop) knowledge across the team. When the workload spikes, whether due to seasonality, almanac get out or sickness, having shared expertise across the team gives y'all the flexibility to handle an increase customer requests.
Some v years ago our customer service team`s response time reduced from an average of 5 hours to less than 1 hour. Since then, the average response time of SuperOffice Customer Support team has remained the aforementioned.
Determination
Reducing your client service response time is incredibly of import.
Not merely tin it assistance you lot make your customers happy and enhance your brand's reputation – just when done properly, it can too ameliorate efficiencies throughout your entire system.
Yet, with the average response taking more than 12 hours, information technology'due south clear that many companies could be doing more to reduce this effigy.
If you're looking to improve client service, and so remember these 5 easy-to-implement techniques to help set your visitor apart as an system that values your customers:
- Implement client service software to make your inbox more than manageable.
- Use email autoresponders to keep your customers in the loop and manage expectations.
- Apply time-based alerts to make sure no emails go missing or are delayed.
- Employ templates and text shortcuts to reduce the time it takes to write each e-mail.
- Categorize all incoming customer service emails and respond based on priority.
To find out more well-nigh our almanac customer service benchmark report and how one,000 companies answer to client service emails, download the written report for complimentary.
Customer Service
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Source: https://www.superoffice.com/blog/response-times/
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