Author: Dreamhost Vendor

Managing customer calls is something that virtually every one of the over 33 million small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. have in common. Of course, taking calls isn’t always optimal or practical.

For example, professionals that rely on on-site work, like electricians or plumbers, can’t always stop what they’re doing to take a customer call. Doctors can’t reasonably interrupt a meeting with one patient to take calls from another. Beyond that, most businesses close down for at least part of the day.

Those demands and realities drive many businesses to use a telephone answering service. Keep reading for some things to look for while choosing phone answering services.

Industry Experience

While it might not seem that important, industry experience matters significantly in some industries. For example, an answering service for a law office or a physician has different demands than an answering service for an accountant.

Service with experience in a given industry will understand the unique demands of that industry and can provide a customer-focused experience.

Time in Business

You should also consider how long the service has been in business. While new companies aren’t doomed to failure, the failure rate is much higher with new businesses.

The last thing you need from a call center is for it to close overnight and leave you and your customers hanging.

Customer Service

You should give some thought to the customer service the answering service provides. While it’s not a one-to-one relationship, you can read the customer service they offer you as a signal about the customer service they’ll give your customers.

If they give you shoddy customer service, there is a good chance they’ll do the same for your customers. Remember, getting a customer to leave for a competitor can be as little as one bad experience.

Reviews

If you can find them, you should look for customer reviews. While there are fewer customer reviews of B2B services than B2C products or services, you can still see them. You can also ask for recommendations for a call center or answering service.

Cost

Weighing the relative costs of different services isn’t the only way you should decide, but it is something you should consider. Breaking your budget for a service that gets slightly better reviews or recommendations isn’t prudent.

Instead, you should select a service that offers what you need while bringing good reviews or recommendations.

Choosing Your Telephone Answering Service

Choosing your telephone answering service can have a tangible impact on revenue. A good answering service can help you secure or retain business, while a lousy service might cost you money.

Things you should bear in mind include factors like cost, customer service, and industry experience. Don’t forget about factors like time in business and customer reviews.

XACT provides telephone answering services for businesses. For questions about our answering services or to get started, contact XACT today.

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.