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!

Is your business on social media? If so, make sure someone is available to respond to comments and messages. Many people are turning to these pages to ask questions and can quickly get frustrated if they don’t get a response.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes; they’re opportunities for personal growth.

Stressed-out customers are more likely to leave you bad reviews which can hurt your brand reputation. Keep them happy by offering customer service solutions that are easily accessible. Outsourcing allows you to access a larger talent pool and the latest technology to increase customer satisfaction.