Your competitors are ready to steal your customers.

Zendesk’s CX Trends 2022 report indicates that 61% of customers defect to a brand’s competitors upon having a bad experience. Two bad experiences and over 76% of your customers will walk out the door.

Delivering exceptional customer service is no longer an option but a necessity.

Let’s say you sell premium travel accessories online and one of your customers recently purchased a travel bag from you. Upon using the bag for a week or two, if they have a concern about the quality of the product, they’ll want to talk with someone from your customer support team. So, they hop onto your online store and head over to your Help & Support page… only to find out that you don’t have a live chat option and they’ll be required to raise a ticket.

And as soon as they raise it, they receive an automated email:

“Thank you for reaching out to us!

Your ticket ID is {Ticket ID}. Be assured that you’re in good hands. Usually, it takes us 72 business hours to respond to tickets but due to the high volume of customer service requests, you may expect a delayed response.

Please bear with us.

We’ll be in touch with you,
{Company} Support Team.”

Customers hate such responses.

They don’t want to wait for 72 hours before they hear back from you. Imagine having to wait 72 hours every single time you send them a response. 90% of Americans have reported customer service to be a major factor that helps them decide whether they want to do business with a company or not? 90% of your customers expect an immediate response.

woman typing a customer service question

3 Strategies Businesses Can Implement to Improve Their Customer Response Time

To help you improve your customer experience, we’ve put together this blog post, where we’ll be focusing on three proven and most effective strategies that businesses should implement to streamline their processes and respond to their customers quickly.

1 – Automate Chatbots on Your Website with Multiple Workflows

The modern customer expects immediate responses from the businesses with which they interact. They don’t want to wait 48-72 hours before they receive a response from one of your customer support executives.

By implementing live chat on your website, they’ll be able to connect with one of your customer support executives immediately. However, depending on the size of your company, it’s important to note that different customer support executives may hold expertise across different areas.

If someone wants information about buying a product, you probably want to route them to your sales team. If they want help troubleshooting an issue, they’d be better off speaking to a support specialist.

So, it’s important to make sure that you’re connecting your customers to the right customer support executives. This helps you save time and your customers get the help they need in less time. Routing your customers to the wrong person wastes time and leads to customer dissatisfaction—which is the last thing you want.

To connect your customers with the right support executives, what you can do is automate chatbot actions with a workflow.

We reached out to Jae Jun, the founder of Gorilla ROI, who said, “80% of the customer questions are the same, and to connect your customers to the right executives, it’s important to create multiple workflows. If one of your customers has a billing-related question, then there’s no point in connecting them with technical experts and vice-versa. Each of the workflows can be broken down further as needed with a response for each selection. Also, if you have a self-service knowledge base, then you can link your knowledge base to your helpdesk – which will allow your customers to easily find what they want from the chatbot itself rather than wanting to connect with your customer support executives.”

2 – Implement a Customer Service Software Like Podium

Software has automated so many areas of our personal lives and added so much convenience to our day-to-day tasks. Similarly, there are tools that can help you make the most out of your work day. By equipping your customer support department with the right tools, you ensure that you’re making the most out of your time and saving your customers valuable time as well.

With Podium, you can empower your employees to provide excellent customer service by giving them the ability to manage all messages in one place, see every customer activity, market more effectively, collect payments in a hassle-free way, and communicate with customers via the platform they prefer: text.

No matter the platform your customers use to reach out to you, all queries are routed right into Podium, making it super easy for your team to respond to customers—and cutting down the time it takes to do so.

man texting a business

3 – Invest in Content That Does the Work for You

Working directly with a support team is great when possible, but sometimes the quickest solution is to completely automate things and remove the need for human-to-human interaction.

Let’s say you sell office chairs that need to be assembled upon delivery. If you don’t have a self-service knowledge base with product assembly videos or guides, your customers are highly likely to reach out to your customer service department.

If you have a small customer service department but thousands of customers, your team will be highly overburdened. And amidst hundreds of inquiries, they’ll face a hard time getting back to everyone.

No matter what product or service you sell, you can identify what problems your customers are facing the most and, based on that information, create a self-service knowledge base.

By creating a knowledge base of resources that gives your customers the information they need, not only do you make sure your customers get help as quickly as possible, but you also take the load off of your employees. This kind of knowledge base can come in the form of a YouTube channel, a blog, an FAQ page, or a combination of all of these things.

The Modern Customer Expects a Quicker Response

These days, customers expect a lightning-fast response and great customer service. They don’t want to wait—oftentimes, they refuse to wait.

Stop waiting hours—or even days—to respond to customers. Implement the customer response strategies we’ve mentioned in this blog post to improve your customer response time and deliver the customer service that modern consumers expect.

At Podium, we want local businesses to thrive, which is why we’re laser-focused on giving small businesses the tools they need to deliver a next-level customer experience.

Claim your 14-day free Podium trial today.