Author: Dreamhost Vendor

There are over 30 million small businesses operating just in the U.S. While these businesses are in many different industries, they share some fundamental concerns.

They all worry about things like cash flow, revenue, and profit margins. They must also worry about things like marketing, lead generation, and customer relationship management.

One of the more important, but often overlooked, elements of customer relationship management is customer service response time. Many businesses put off responding to customer service calls because it often involves dealing with an angry customer. Yet, that delay can have serious consequences.

If you’re in the habit of putting off responding to customer service inquiries, keep reading to learn why your response times matter.

What Is Customer Service Response Time?

Customers can potentially reach out to your business with customer service inquiries in a variety of ways. Some of the more common ways include:

• Phone calls
• Emails
• Dedicated ticket systems
• Social media

The exact methods available often depend on the company and the product or service. Response time is a customer service metric that tracks the average time it takes for your business to react to those inquiries.

With that essential definition covered, let’s look at why this metric matters.

Limit Customer Frustration

Anyone who has spent half an hour waiting to talk to a customer service rep at a call center understands that frustration mounts quickly when you have a problem. That frustration doesn’t get any better when someone must wait 24-48 hours to get a response.

Yet, these are normal customer wait times for customer service responses in a variety of industries. Of course, the longer you make someone wait, the less forgiving they will become.

That intolerance will only grow sharper if the customer service response doesn’t resolve their problem the first time out.

Long Wait Times Can Cost You Customers

The real risk you run with poor response times from your contact center is that customers will abandon your business. Customers will often read your delay as an implicit sign that their business doesn’t matter to you. In other words, you provide poor customer service.

Like it or not, even a single instance of poor customer service can make a customer drop a business or brand. You don’t need too much of that before it starts hitting the bottom line.

Managing Response Times

If you’re in the habit of putting off customer service calls or emails, you should consider an alternative. For example, you can outsource your customer service to a third-party customer help desk.

You avoid most of the things that make customer service a challenge and your customers get better response times. Those better response times reduce frustration and signal that customer service matters to you.

Customer Service Response Time and You

While you may loathe customer service calls and emails, your response time can have a meaningful impact on your business. Take too long and customers may well abandon your business or brand for someone else.

XACT provides a range of customer service-related services, including customer help desk services. For questions or more information, please contact XACT today.

Customer service is critical to almost any business — it vital to the success of your products and services. But customer service must be better than excellent. It should be stellar.

Ultimately, customer service is the way you win new customers and keep old ones loyal to your brand. Your customer service metrics must be as good as your other business metrics. Otherwise, you will start to lose customers quicker than you can count.

Keep reading to learn how to boost your customer service metrics.

1. Deeply Understand Your Customers’ Needs

You cannot hope to start moving the needle on KPIs, such as customer response time or customer conversion, without deep insight. The better you understand your customers’ needs and journey, the better service you can provide.

What do your customers need at each stage in their buyer journey? If you deeply understand these touchpoints, you can allocate resources, training, and information to boost important metrics.

2. Automate Your Processes

If your customer service department isn’t automating repetitive processes, this is your sign to get started right away!

From categorizing customer service tickets to responding to complaints, there are plenty of processes that are repetitive and time-consuming. They don’t have to be manually conducted, however.

Process automation is powerful, and there are plenty of technologies out there to help automate your workflows. Automation provides consistent customer service and gives your employees more time to focus on the stuff that really matters.

3. Offer Self-Service to Customers

A key performance indicator for customer service is ticket volume. Ideally, you want to see this number decrease, as this means customers don’t need any help or have any complaints.

So, how can you decrease incoming tickets? By providing a self-service option for customers that allows them to figure things out by themselves. This could be a knowledge base or FAQ section, or even a search bar in the navigation menu of your site.

People like being able to help themselves and avoid getting in touch with your customer service department at all costs. So, help them to do this.

4. Provide Proactive and Personalized Support

As mentioned earlier, understanding your customers’ needs is vital. If you understand pain points, then you can create a proactive strategy to deal with the issues before customers even bring them to you.

Each customer should feel like they are getting personalized, proactive support rather than generic, reactive responses. This will create an impressive feedback loop that will help to retain loyal customers.

5. Outsource Customer Service Solutions

If all of the above sounds a bit overwhelming, then why not simply outsource your customer service? Boosting your customer service metrics can be extremely costly and stressful if you’re doing it all in-house.

Outsourcing to a call center will save you money, give you access to the latest technology, and ensure the best service for your customers.

Get a Little Support Moving Customer Service Metrics

These five tips are bound to get you impressive results, all you have to do is start putting them into place!

If you’re committed to boosting customer service metrics, let us help you! XACT is an organic extension of your customer support solution — take a look at our services to see what we can do for you!

Most people don’t realize how massive the support dispatch service industry is. It’s already valued at 1.65 billion dollars. So what makes a support dispatch service so important?

Well, the answer is simple. For many small businesses today, having a reliable support dispatch service is vital for more than providing them with an excellent customer setup. It can help build and improve your business in many ways.

If you’re wondering exactly how a support dispatch service works, you’re in the right place. Keep reading to learn more.

How Does a Support Dispatch Service Work?

A support dispatch service is when someone takes incoming calls and creates tickets for each of those service calls. The responsibilities of a dispatcher include keeping customer files in a database organized and updated.

Dispatch tickets are essential because they help keep the company organized and promptly address each customer’s call. When a customer calls, you will take down their information and create a dispatch ticket. This dispatch ticket will then be sent to the appropriate department so that they can address the issue.

How Support Dispatch Services Can Benefit Your Business

Dispatch services provide much-needed support to businesses by managing phone calls and tasks related to customer service issues. This can free up time for your business to focus on other areas of the company.

A successful dispatcher is courteous, articulate, patient, efficient, and accurate. That can leave a positive impression in the mind of your customer. This is just another benefit of using a support dispatch service.

What to Consider when choosing a Support Dispatch Service

Choosing the right support dispatch service is key. Here are a few things you should consider before selecting: How will they handle issues? Is there a dedicated team for your account? Or is there just one person for all accounts?

Do they provide access to data? For example, if you want to see how many tickets were opened today or where tickets are coming from, these details should be easy to access.

Other considerations include how quickly they can respond. In todays fast-paced world, speed is everything. Customers won’t wait 20 minutes for an answer when they can get help from another company in seconds. So look for a company with a reputation for responding quickly and providing excellent customer service.

A company like Xact has an excellent reputation. While being able to provide high-level support dispatch services. It would help if you considered whether the company has technical expertise in the area where they’re offering support services. If they don’t understand your product or industry, they might not be able to provide you with quality results which is what you want from a support dispatch service.

You also want to know if they can handle multiple channels. It’s not just about email anymore. Customers often turn to social media and other online forums when they have an issue with their product or service, so make sure the support staff knows how to handle those requests, phone calls, and emails.

A Support Dispatch Service You Can Rely On!

A support dispatch service is essential for keeping customers satisfied and ensuring that the company runs smoothly. The proper dispatch support will provide the necessary customer service experience and knowledge.

You want a support dispatch service that knows what theyre doing when it comes to providing customer support services. If you’re interested in learning how XACT can help take your business to the next level, contact us today to get started!

Customer service should be more than a tick-in-the-box for your business. After all, eight out of ten people claim they feel an emotional connection to a company when they get a response from a customer service representative.

So customer service is more than a nice thing to have; it’s an intelligent way of doing business.

We’ve put together this short guide to help you understand the benefits of using a customer service help desk.

What Is a Customer Service Help Desk?

You’ve probably encountered a customer help desk before, even if it was called something else.

A help desk is your customer’s first contact with the business when they have a question, issue, or complaint. You typically handle it like a ticketing system.

When the customer raises a new query, you open a ticket for that query. All communication between you and the customer happens as part of that “ticket” until it’s resolved.

The Benefits of Having a Helpdesk

If you have customers, you probably already talk to them via email or phone. So you might wonder if your business needs something as formal as a help desk. Here are the main benefits.

It Helps Your Team Run Efficiently

Handling emails and calls from customers takes time, and there’s often a multitude of reasons why they contact you. However, when you use a help desk system, each new query will get assigned to the most appropriate specialist.

That means your team isn’t wasting time with complex queries they can’t answer, and it means the customer gets a faster resolution. All in all, it’s a far more efficient way of dealing with customers.

You’ll Have Happier Customers

Customers understand how help desks operate, and they will find it straightforward to contact your team and raise a ticket instead of scouring through your website looking for a phone number.

Plus, they’ll get real-time updates and all communications in one place. It will improve customer satisfaction levels, particularly if you demonstrate you can reliably handle and resolve issues quickly and professionally.

It Will Make Your Business Look Professional

Companies with customer support help desks will show that they are a professional, growing business. When you’re trying to secure more sales, that’s a fantastic feature for any customer pitch.

So it will help you grow your business faster, as potential customers will see that you place a high value on your customer service early on.

You Can Monitor Resolutions

When using a help desk, you’ll build up valuable data about your customer support, such as the types of queries you get and the average resolution time.

You can use those metrics to drive improvements across your business, reduce time spent handling issues, reduce complaints, and improve customer service.

Make a Customer Service Help Desk Your Next Step

Exceed your client’s expectations by investing in customer service. A customer service help desk is the route to happier clients and a sensible way to help your team become more efficient.

For more information on how technology can help your business and how to get started, speak to our team.

Can you guess the top trend for marketing next year? Here’s a clue: you’re probably reading this article on the device in question.

That’s right; it’s our mobile phones. We go everywhere with these tiny devices that keep us connected to the world, and savvy marketers have started to figure out the potential for businesses.

To help you understand how to promote your business via mobile, read our guide to planning a successful mobile marketing campaign.

Set a Goal

If you want success with your mobile marketing campaign, you first need to understand what success means to your business.

Do you want more leads to your email list? Or do you want to increase brand awareness? Perhaps you want to use mobile marketing to boost your website traffic instead.

Whatever your priority, make sure you write this down so your phone campaign has clear objectives.

Define Your Audience

The most successful marketing campaigns have a clear target for their promotional material. Do you know your target audience and what they want from your brand?

If you’re unsure, it’s time to research. Find out the demographics of your customer and their online activity. The latter will provide helpful clues about where to target your mobile promotions.

Craft Your Creatives

With mobile, you’ve got plenty of choices about approaching and designing the best mobile marketing campaign. You can opt for ads, text messages, online forms and surveys, video, audio, or written content.

The list is (almost) endless. So you will need to decide on the format before you design your creatives.

With the creative side of your campaign, there are two significant considerations to keep at the forefront of your mind.

First, you’ll need to find a striking, attention-grabbing design. People might be active on mobile – but they also have incredibly short attention spans!

Secondly, you’ll need to craft a headline and a hook for your promotional copy. Captivating and exciting headlines rather than bland and predictable phrases can significantly impact your marketing success.

Set Up Your Reporting

You set a goal, and now it’s time to make sure you’re tracking key metrics to help you measure your progress.

Choose an analytics platform that supports the channel you intend to use, and create a custom report with your most important KPIs.

Run a Split Test

Before you launch your final campaign, you should do a beta test to see if it resonates with your audience as much as anticipated.

The best method is to run a split test for your campaign, showing one idea to half your audience and an alternative idea to the other. The one with the best conversion rate will be your winning campaign design.

Launch Your Campaign 

Now it’s time to launch your campaign. Make sure you review it daily at the beginning. If it performs better than expected, scale it. If it’s not working, tweak your creatives or your target audience.

Are You Ready for Mobile Marketing?

Any business can succeed with mobile marketing, providing you plan first and get clear on your target audience. Use this guide to get going with your first promotional campaign.

You can also use this time to discover how our technology solutions can help you achieve your marketing goals. Your first step is to connect with our team here.