Improve Your Customer Service By Improving Response Time
You may have heard the adage “patience is a virtue,” but patience is a virtue an increasingly smaller number of consumers have. In recent years, consumers have gotten used to getting things done faster. They can speed date. Fast food restaurants serve complete meals almost as soon as diners are finished placing their orders. Consumers no longer have to wait for snail mail to deliver personal messages or packages to their loved ones with email, Skype, FaceTime, FedEx and UPS at their immediate disposal.
As consumers are able to do more and more things almost instantly, they’re adjusting the expectations they have for businesses to respond to their inquiries and resolve their complaints. Consumers don’t want to be kept on hold, and they certainly don’t want to wait any longer than necessary to receive a response from a business. Approximately 75 percent of consumers believe that calling a business is the best way to ensure they receive a fast response, but 62 percent of them claim they have to contact a business multiple times before their issue is resolved successfully.
A QUICK RESPONSE TIME IS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
When it comes to customer service, having a quick response time is critical to your success. Response time is a key performance indicator for business owners and consumers alike. Business managers look at their response time to gauge how quickly their team is communicating with clients and identify ways to improve. Consumers view response time as a way to determine how much a business values their business as well as their time.
A prolonged wait time often leads to poor perceptions and reviews of a company’s customer service. It’s also responsible for a considerable amount of consumer attrition.
An estimated 55 percent of shoppers contact a business with the intention of making a purchase, but back out due to a negative customer service experience. Approximately 53 percent of callers become agitated if they don’t speak with a customer service agent immediately. About 54 percent of customers will share their bad customer service experiences with at least five people, and nearly half will share their negative experiences with twice that number of listeners. More than 40 percent of dissatisfied shoppers post negative reviews on social media.
On the positive side, half of consumers will frequent a business more often after they have a positive customer service experience, and 55 percent say having easy access to support increases their affection for a brand. Approximately 87 percent of consumers share their positive customer service experiences, with 33 percent telling five or more people and 23 percent sharing with at least 10 individuals. About 30 percent of shoppers share stories about their positive customer service experiences on social media.
When you consider that 88 percent of consumers are influenced by online customer service reviews when they’re contemplating a purchase, earning positive reviews is becoming a must for many B2C organizations. How can you get more positive online reviews and gain an advantage over your competitors? By shortening your response time.
ACCESSDIRECT CAN HELP
If you’re looking for an affordable way to improve your customer service by improving your response time, contact AccessDirect to learn about our answering service. Our service enables you to respond to your clients and prospects quickly and gives callers access to the information they’re looking for instantly.
- Call Forwarding: With call forwarding, your calls will be forwarded to your mobile phone when you’re out of the office without you having to share your personal phone number. Your clients will call your business using your company’s phone number, and our system will direct their calls to you seamlessly no matter where you’re located.
- Send Voicemail to Email: Even your most demanding clients know you and your staff can’t take their calls all the time. They know you have business meetings to attend and other customers to help. While they know these things, it doesn’t mean they want to wait very long for you to get back to them. When you use our service, you’ll be able to access your voicemails and their transcriptions through your email account. This gives you the ability to check your voicemail and prioritize your return calls even when you’re in a meeting.
- Auto-Attendant: With our auto-attendant, your clients will have answers to their questions right away. Our information boxes can provide greetings with your menu specials, your hours of operation and location, or even when you’ll return to the office. This means your clients won’t have to wait to get the information they want, even though you were unavailable to take their calls.
Maintaining a quick response rate is an effective way to improve the level of satisfaction consumers have with your customer service, retain customers, earn positive reviews, and establish a competitive advantage. In order to enjoy these meaningful benefits, you have to have the right tools in place to shorten your response rate. Contact AccessDirect to learn more about the features we provide that can help you develop and maintain a fast response rate today.
