Pace Up Your Customer Support Response Time with These Tips

71% of customers believe that a quick response from the service team of the company can greatly improve their experience. Customer service is a crucial part of any company. In the end, it is customers and sales that can do justice to your product and efforts. Listening to customer’s queries and complaints, analyzing them, and providing a solution for them is what you need to do.

And in the world of automation, just hiring a customer support team or agents will only get half of the required help. Implementing a support ticket system can fulfill the other half. The online ticketing system has several advantages to serve you. Let us have a look at what you need to do for pacing up your customer service response time:

• Implement a Live Chat Option

Ever wondered why live chat is this popular on every digital medium? Because it is easy to use, is fast, and reduces your response time effectively. Live chat is no longer a ‘new’ feature. The majority of the businesses implement it to serve their customers with the best services. Live chat support helps your support agents and teams to respond faster to solve your customer queries. 

In case of any complex queries, chatbots can help you to keep the customers engaged until your agent takes over. Chatbots can also help to study a visitor’s behavior, find out which pages were seen, and analyze the overall time spent on your website. You can also gather this user data and serve a personalized experience to your customer even before starting a conversation with them.

A chatbot studies the issue and automatically routes it to an appropriate team. Additionally, chatbots can also analyze conversations between customer support agents and clients. Mainly chatbot helps you with these two things:

• Helps you manage multiple customers at the same time
• Helps you provide support to customers 24X7

Live chat makes sure that every customer’s inquiry is registered so no query goes unnoticed. Also, you can simply integrate live chat with your ticketing software and avoid lengthy email responses.  Thus, even if you miss the chat due to the absence of your agent, the query ticket still gets registered and can be looked at later on.

• Initiate an Omnichannel Response

Customers want the facility to contact the customer support teams through different channels and through different ways. Omnichannel support comes to your help here. It enables you to take the customer experience to the next level.

It focuses on the seamless integration of all the available channels. It can also help you to bring down your average customer response time. It not only allows customers to choose their preferred method of communication but also allows them to transit between multiple methods in the same interaction. It supports all possible mediums of communication like:

• Live chat
• Social media
• Self-service
• Email

• Autoresponders, Email Templates, and Canned Responses

The above are some automation features that you can use to reduce your customer support response time. For instance, canned responses refer to the pre-saved or pre-formatted text. This feature usually includes common responses or common greeting messages that you can save for future use.

With such messages, you can promote quick replies and save much more time for your agents. How? By saving the support reps time from typing repetitive answers time and again. Additionally, they reduce typos and relieve the stress of customer support agents. Below are some of the situations where canned responses can help:

• While transferring to another live chat agent
• Greeting email and notification
• When agents desire to ask for further details
• While ending the customer chat
• While talking about features in-detail
• When the agents want to clear your understanding of a query

Sometimes, all a customer wants is to know that their query is successfully registered and their solution is on its way. And when their complaints go ignored, that is when a negative sentiment begins to appear. It affects your long-term relationship with the customer. And this is where the auto-responders come into the picture.

Through auto responders, you can involve your customers through every step of the resolution journey.

Email templates can be helpful too for saving your time while writing back to your customers. Also, by using pre-designed email templates, you can send personalized responses to your customers.

• Track and Analyze the Performance of Your Customer Service Reps

Agents are a vital part of your customer support. Consistently analyzing their performance can give you an idea about their average first-time responses. Once you know the first-time responses of each agent, you can then collectively work on improving them by reducing the roadblocks that they are facing in their job. By keeping the analytics in reference, you can check if they are performing well or not. 

Wrapping Up

Thus, the best solution for reducing your customer support response time is to start using helpdesk ticketing software. It has all the above advantages in-built. The customer support software stores every single conversation and interaction you have had with any customer. 

This means that you can look back to those data and understand their pain points for identifying their problems and using this information to be more helpful while responding to their queries for further times. 

By using the right tool, you can achieve a faster response rate. It also depends on which ticketing software you choose. Pick an online ticketing system that helps you to track response time and analyze data over a specific period. It is also important to keep a note of your response time to check whether it has been reduced collectively or not.