Delivering excellent customer support is crucial in building strong customer relationships and creating a positive brand image. SuperOffice, a software company specializing in customer relationship management, released research with these key findings based on how 1000 companies performed in 2023.
- 62% of companies do not respond to customer service emails.
- 90% of companies do not acknowledge or inform the customer that an email has been received.
- 97% of companies do not send a follow up email to customers to see if they are satisfied with the response.
- Only 20% of companies are able to answer questions in full on the first reply.
- The average response time to handle a customer service request is 12 hours and 10 minutes.
You can optimize your helpdesk and get ahead of your competitors by doing just a few simple things.
Respond to your customers.
Utilize a helpdesk for all your customer support emails. Your team can all collaborate in one platform and you’ll never lose track of your customers’ messages. You can additionally sort your tickets by urgency level based on your business workflows and structure.
Let your customers know that you’ve received their message.
Let customers know you’ve received their message using a trigger! That can set expectations on when you will reply, run through any other avenues customers have to resolve a potential issue on their own, all while the ticket is in the queue waiting for an agent. Helpful info may include links to your help center, any self-service portal, account management page, return portals, etc.
Survey your customers.
Figure out how satisfied your customers are with your customer service and brand, as a whole. You can set up CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys within most helpdesks. You may need to find a 3rd party platform for NPS (net promoter score) surveys. If customers are unhappy with any aspect of your product/service, this may be your chance to turn things back around. It’s often cheaper to retain existing customers than to convert new ones. Use feedback to continually improve your product.
Maintain quality control.
It’s important to resolve any customer issues as quickly as possible before you lose the customer. Agents need to be answering quickly, accurately, and completely. Anything requiring a customer to follow up about the same issue is bound to leave a nasty taste in their mouths. Train your agents well and do quality checks to be certain they’re up to standard; for example, we audit almost 100% of tickets when an agent first goes live and that number goes down from there. You should be using knowledge bases to store information and update your team of any potential changes.
Respond ASAP & provide self-service tools.
Try to maintain a low wait time with your customers. If your current team does not allow for you to respond quicker, you may want to consider using a BPO and/or creating self-service options. Tickets regarding FAQs can often be resolved using built-in article suggestion features in your helpdesk. For more specific issues like account management, returns, order info, you can look into whether your partners have a self-service portal that you can incorporate into your website where customers can help themselves off-hours. If you have the budget, you may also want to look into an AI chatbot to run more complex policies, obtain images, redirect to the correct agent, etc. At minimum, you should have some FAQs on your website that will allow customers to find quick answers. You should create targeted triggers to send out different auto-responders to customers as their ticket is created as a next step.
How does your setup measure up to your competitors? Message our team for an audit of your helpdesk today! If you don’t have the bandwidth to do this yourself, we can implement the changes required so that your customers are taken care of.
