Long gone are the days that customers are willing to spend hours and hours on hold to a customer service team that simply aren’t responding. Instead, they are looking to get all of their questions answered in the quickest and most efficient way possible. If your customer service is lagging behind, you could find yourself in all sorts of trouble. First of all, it is going to leave a negative impression amongst your customers if they can’t get their issues solved. Not only this, but it could lead to them not coming back again. Plus, if you have competitors that are offering speedy and effective customer service, you could easily end up in a situation where you are getting overtaken.
There are plenty of steps that you can take to speed up your customer service as much as possible. Ultimately, it is worth taking on all of them as the heart of so many businesses is based on good customer service. So, here are just a few of the main steps that you can look to take on.
Put on a live chat option
While many older people in days gone by would prefer to get in touch with a customer service agent over the phone, this simply isn’t the case for a younger demographic in the modern world. Instead, they much prefer to speak via instant messaging. First of all, they are more comfortable communicating via a text-based service rather than a verbal one. Plus, this is often a way of getting issues resolved at the earliest possible opportunity. So, if you have not yet done so, it is certainly going to be worth looking into the best live chat for website. Bear in mind that not all live chats were created equal, so it is certainly going to be worth picking the right one for your needs.
At the same time, once you put a live chat option in, you shouldn’t simply let it run without a second thought. Instead, you should evaluate exactly how well it is doing and whether there are any tweaks that need to be made. While some live chats are now powered by AI, many also have customer service agents at the other end. If this is the case, you certainly need to provide them with enough training. Otherwise, you can easily find that they are trying to use a new system but it is not having the results that you are looking for.
Provide training to your customer service team
Right at the heart of good customer service comes your team. Without being able to rely on them, you are going to struggle to speed up your offering. First of all, you should make sure to treat them with the value and respect that they deserve. Otherwise, it is more than likely that they are going to work in a slower manner and may even want to leave your organisation entirely. More and more companies are realising just how vital customer service is to what they are providing, and it is certainly worth keeping this firmly in mind at all times.
Whenever you are going to bring in any new systems, you need to make sure that you have a sufficient level of training for the team. If they struggle to keep up with it, this is inevitably going to slow you down in the first instance. At the same time, you also need to make sure that you are getting their input whenever you are putting in anything new or making any wholesale changes. After all, they are at the front line of your customer service offering and you are missing a major trick if you don’t get their input. While you need to have some very clear guidelines in place, a team tends to do better when they have some sort of autonomy and they are comfortable in making their own decisions and executing these effectively.
Offer your customer the chance to serve themselves
If your customers can solve their own issues without too much trouble, this obviously offers plenty of direct advantages. First of all, they don’t need to raise any tickets for your customer service team to tick off. Not only this, but they are going to walk away happy and your company naturally gets the kudos without needing any sort of involvement at all. When it comes to self-service, you should aim to constantly improve your offering and build up the database of knowledge as much as possible.
As your company grows and evolves the type and number of issues out there are likely to change at the same time. With this in mind, if you notice that a problem is being identified again and again by your customer service team, it is certainly worth adding it to the overall self-service database as this is a common issue. If you are using AI, it may even be worth having the issue right at the forefront. This way, you can get it solved sooner rather than later.
Bring in automation where needed
A common feature of modern customer service is the presence of AI and just how quickly this has been rolled out across companies all over the world. Automation can be highly useful as it means that issues are getting solved without too much trouble at all. Bear in mind that not all AIs were created equal, so it is certainly worth doing your own research and getting into a situation where you are comfortable with the one you are using. Again, it should all come down to getting the input from the customer service team in how useful they find the chatbots. After all, they are going to be the ones eventually dealing with the more complex issues that get filtered down to them after going through this initial AI step.
If there are any tasks that are overly repetitive and can be automated, there is no doubt that getting this done should be a priority. Ultimately, the whole point of bringing in AI and similar tools is that you are making the jobs of your staff members easier – allowing them to focus on more complex and time consuming tasks. There may well need to be plenty of reassurance provided here as you don’t want your current team to feel like they are at risk from a job perspective. Instead, you will want to present them with what an opportunity it is that they have in front of them.
Measure how quick your response times are
If you don’t have an initial base level for how long your response times happen to be, you are going to seriously struggle to get this down. So, you should certainly look at how quickly your team is responding to issues and set this down as an initial basemark. You can then look at the ways to get this figure lower and lower as needed. People and organisations tend to work better when they have clear targets to aim at. Therefore, it is certainly worth making these as clear as possible, as well as potentially offering up some incentives if your team is able to get this number down. If you wanted to really drill down into the data even further, you could always look to divide it up by category. This way, you know which areas are causing the highest number of problems and your team is expending the most time on. You are then going to be able to target each issue individually.
Think about what channels you offer support on
While it is a good idea in theory to offer support across a number of different channels, you also need to think how this is going to work from a practical point of view. If you are working across a number of different social media channels, all of these need to be properly monitored. If people put out a message on a certain channel but nobody is looking at it, this is obviously going to lead to a major drop in response times. As such, you should make sure that you only offer up the channels that you are going to staff. You may wish to drive as much traffic through your website as possible as this will allow you to put everything in one place, giving you the opportunity to keep everything as organised as it can be.
Keep an eye on customer feedback
The final piece of the puzzle is going to involve keeping an eye on any customer feedback that you are receiving. This way, you can be properly and fully ready to respond to any recurring themes and issues without too much of a fuss at all.
Speeding up your customer service should offer a whole host of advantages to your company as a whole. These are just a few of the main ways that you have of achieving this goal and bringing your company forwards to a whole new level of achievement.
