Is the customer service you offer fast and efficient? Do you make it a point to resolve questions or complaints you receive from customers as quickly as possible?
If your answer is no—or even “I’m not sure”—then it’s time to rethink your customer care priorities. The simple fact is this: In today’s competitive marketplace, fast customer service matters—and the companies that fail to achieve it can’t expect to win the loyalty of increasingly demanding consumers.
It is understood that outstanding customer support entails a lot of things and can be quite a stressful job. Maintaining one’s calm, having top skills and knowledge, a robust personality ready to help, ability to manage time and several tasks at once, ability to show empathy and care, skill in remembering customer details, and doing all these and more at top speed – all belong to the customer service realm. The tasks that service personnel deal with daily tend to become rote and boring, making the job a lot harder. However, this constant challenge must be overcome, while maintaining speed in customer service – customers have a lot less patience today. Hence, for customers, top class service would mean efficiency, knowledge, and immediacy. There is a very real fear of things falling through the cracks or the temptation to dish out half-baked service in order to feed the need for speed of customers.
The best way to ramp up on the speed in customer service is by putting oneself in the customer’s place. They engage with a company in the hope that their lives would be a lot easier, the company would understand their problems, and treat them with empathy and care. All these expectations have the underlying and unsaid need of having all delivered to them with efficiency but also with speed. One of the top reasons for customers to leave a company and or provide poor comments about a company would be slow service. Online transactions and shopping carts are abandoned daily for the same reason – delays and slower than expected service and navigation. The challenge for companies is herculean – simply because every customer’s expectation of speed in customer service would differ and despite best efforts, companies are unable to match each need for speed, resulting in lowered customer satisfaction and maybe even churn.
Customers just want to have personalized service and speedy resolutions to their problems. Companies with a humane outlook and practice in speed in customer service would be more likely to gain and retain a larger number of customers. Companies that constantly seem to struggle with retaining customers would be the ones unable to maintain and sustain speed in customer service. In order to achieve good customer service, we have to throw consistency and reliability into the mix. It’s great if you can provide fast and accurate service to customers, but if you can’t keep it consistent, then the quality of your overall customer service will suffer. The only way to really reap the benefits of fast and accurate customer service is to make sure that customers can rely on it, no matter how or when they contact your customer service department.
Your product may be the best on the market, but your business won’t be successful without premium customer service solutions. To make sure that each of your customers has a positive overall experience, you need to make sure that your service is always reliable. You’ll notice that while speed, accuracy, and reliability are all important characteristics of good customer service, none of them will work as well alone as they will together; you’ll need a combination of all three to create the ideal experience for customers.
Despite the critical nature of speed in customer service, several companies seem to sorely lack in this area. A study revealed that a mere 37% of companies were able to respond within an hour to sales leads, 23% never responded, and the average response time for most companies was about 42 hours. This clearly shows that the majority of companies are unable to / unwilling to make speed in customer service a priority. On the other hand, this also bodes well for companies that are willing to keep pace with and engage with existing and prospective customers at the speed at which they expect. Such companies would pre-empt opportunities and act on them well before their competition would even get ‘whiff’ of them – a great way to forge and stay ahead.
The good news is that speed in customer service is not that hard – technology has ensured it. With so many different customer service channels, communication, and engagement with customers are now only a click of a button away. It is a colossal waste when companies fail to utilize all the avenues at their disposal to provide the kind of service customers expect, and in turn heap problems on their businesses. Customers today, can reach out to companies via social media – research shows that more than 50% of consumers use the various social platforms to connect with companies. Given that immediacy and speed are the USPs of social media platforms, customers expect that companies will always be available and respond to them extremely fast. Statistics collected with regard to what customers expect for speed in customer service via social media reveal that an hour to 6 hours is all customers are willing to give. The number of hours depends on the social medium being used, and 77% of customers said that 6 hours is the turnaround response time they expect via email.
While companies – about 90% say that they do respond to customers instantly via social media, this claim is refuted by customers. At least 58% of customers say that they did not receive a reply from companies or that the response times were as high as 9 hours – too long for customers to want to wait. Slow pace service would result in negativity and customer churn – which over time would adversely affect the prospects of any company.
Despite these shocking statistics and consistent demands of customers for speed in customer service, businesses seem to be neglecting this aspect. There is no easy way out – customers demand near perfection in every aspect of their relationship with companies and only those companies who are able to come close to these expectations would have some hope for survival. Every company needs customers and for a business to survive, most of these customers would need to be profitable and loyal. However, in the tough market of today, these attributes are not a given – they must be earned and fought for since there are far too many similar offerings in the market today. The only point of differentiation would seem to be service and speed in customer service would make a company stand out. Staying connected with customers is a great idea, and helps to build a great rapport with them. Ensure, however, that swift action not only saves time, money, and effort for the customer but for your company too.
It is understood that outstanding customer support entails a lot of things and can be quite a stressful job. Maintaining one’s calm, having top skills and knowledge, a robust personality ready to help, ability to manage time and several tasks at once, ability to show empathy and care, skill in remembering customer details, and doing all these and more at top speed – all belong to the customer service realm. The tasks that service personnel deal with daily tend to become rote and boring, making the job a lot harder. However, this constant challenge must be overcome, while maintaining speed in customer service – customers have a lot less patience today. Hence, for customers, top class service would mean efficiency, knowledge, and immediacy. There is a very real fear of things falling through the cracks or the temptation to dish out half-baked service in order to feed the need for speed of customers.
The best way to ramp up on the speed in customer service is by putting oneself in the customer’s place. They engage with a company in the hope that their lives would be a lot easier, the company would understand their problems, and treat them with empathy and care. All these expectations have the underlying and unsaid need of having all delivered to them with efficiency but also with speed. One of the top reasons for customers to leave a company and or provide poor comments about a company would be slow service. Online transactions and shopping carts are abandoned daily for the same reason – delays and slower than expected service and navigation. The challenge for companies is herculean – simply because every customer’s expectation of speed in customer service would differ and despite best efforts, companies are unable to match each need for speed, resulting in lowered customer satisfaction and maybe even churn.
Customers just want to have personalized service and speedy resolutions to their problems. Companies with a humane outlook and practice in speed in customer service would be more likely to gain and retain a larger number of customers. Companies that constantly seem to struggle with retaining customers would be the ones unable to maintain and sustain speed in customer service. In order to achieve good customer service, we have to throw consistency and reliability into the mix. It’s great if you can provide fast and accurate service to customers, but if you can’t keep it consistent, then the quality of your overall customer service will suffer. The only way to really reap the benefits of fast and accurate customer service is to make sure that customers can rely on it, no matter how or when they contact your customer service department.
Your product may be the best on the market, but your business won’t be successful without premium customer service solutions. To make sure that each of your customers has a positive overall experience, you need to make sure that your service is always reliable. You’ll notice that while speed, accuracy, and reliability are all important characteristics of good customer service, none of them will work as well alone as they will together; you’ll need a combination of all three to create the ideal experience for customers.
Despite the critical nature of speed in customer service, several companies seem to sorely lack in this area. A study revealed that a mere 37% of companies were able to respond within an hour to sales leads, 23% never responded, and the average response time for most companies was about 42 hours. This clearly shows that the majority of companies are unable to / unwilling to make speed in customer service a priority. On the other hand, this also bodes well for companies that are willing to keep pace with and engage with existing and prospective customers at the speed at which they expect. Such companies would pre-empt opportunities and act on them well before their competition would even get ‘whiff’ of them – a great way to forge and stay ahead.
The good news is that speed in customer service is not that hard – technology has ensured it. With so many different customer service channels, communication, and engagement with customers are now only a click of a button away. It is a colossal waste when companies fail to utilize all the avenues at their disposal to provide the kind of service customers expect, and in turn heap problems on their businesses. Customers today, can reach out to companies via social media – research shows that more than 50% of consumers use the various social platforms to connect with companies. Given that immediacy and speed are the USPs of social media platforms, customers expect that companies will always be available and respond to them extremely fast. Statistics collected with regard to what customers expect for speed in customer service via social media reveal that an hour to 6 hours is all customers are willing to give. The number of hours depends on the social medium being used, and 77% of customers said that 6 hours is the turnaround response time they expect via email.
While companies – about 90% say that they do respond to customers instantly via social media, this claim is refuted by customers. At least 58% of customers say that they did not receive a reply from companies or that the response times were as high as 9 hours – too long for customers to want to wait. Slow pace service would result in negativity and customer churn – which over time would adversely affect the prospects of any company.
Despite these shocking statistics and consistent demands of customers for speed in customer service, businesses seem to be neglecting this aspect. There is no easy way out – customers demand near perfection in every aspect of their relationship with companies and only those companies who are able to come close to these expectations would have some hope for survival. Every company needs customers and for a business to survive, most of these customers would need to be profitable and loyal. However, in the tough market of today, these attributes are not a given – they must be earned and fought for since there are far too many similar offerings in the market today. The only point of differentiation would seem to be service and speed in customer service would make a company stand out. Staying connected with customers is a great idea, and helps to build a great rapport with them. Ensure, however, that swift action not only saves time, money, and effort for the customer but for your company too.
Interested in Sparkcentral Digital Customer Service Solution? Learn more. Article by – Sabin Gomez Development Manager | Contact Center Digital Solutions | Customer Experience Strategy.If You Snooze, You Lose