3 Fantastic Ways to Quickly Respond to a Customer Inquiry

Almost 50% of US businesses fail within two years of starting. However, there are certain measures you can take to avoid this.

One of the most important aspects of running a successful business is properly managing your customer relationships.

This involves having a solid strategy in place when it comes to how you respond to a customer inquiry. Let’s look at how you can handle them efficiently and maximize customer satisfaction.

1. Canned Responses

These are pre-made responses that inform your customers that someone will be with them shortly. Although they often won’t resolve issues on their own, they avoid a situation where a customer submits an inquiry and doesn’t receive a response.

This could cause them to lose faith in your company and turn to a competitor instead. Canned responses are best kept as general statements, such as “We’ve received your inquiry and a customer service representative will contact you shortly.”

Just be sure to minimize your response time so that you don’t keep your customers waiting. Otherwise, canned responses won’t do much to help the situation.

2. Outsourcing

This is a notably effective way to improve your response times—especially for small businesses.

Outsourcing ensures that your customers can always get in touch with someone when they need to. It can also allow companies to handle customer inquiries after business hours, which will greatly improve the level of customer service they can provide. However, it’s essential that you outsource to reputable businesses.

The way they handle customer inquiries could mean the difference between fixing a problem or damaging your relationship with them. To find the best company to outsource to, research its past reputation and see what other customers have had to say. You should also ensure they’ve worked with businesses like yours in the past.

3. Use AI

Using artificial intelligence can significantly reduce the time it takes to respond to your customers. In some cases, it may even be able to help them find an answer to their question or concern.

For instance, let’s assume a customer wants to know your business’s hours of operation on holidays. An AI program could instantly reply with this information, or it could direct them to a resource where they can find what they’re looking for.

Otherwise, they might not be able to find the information they need when they need it. This could create problems later on and strain the relationship you have with them.

Handle Each Customer Inquiry Appropriately

To get the most out of your customer relationships, it’s essential to treat each customer inquiry with care.

Consider the guidelines above so that you can develop a comprehensive response strategy that can resolve issues as soon as possible. Feel free to get in touch with our team at XACT today. We’re ready to help take your customer service response times to the next level.