Creating An Efficient Customer Response Team

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Customer support is similar to paramedics in some ways. The success of both these teams depends on how quickly they can respond to an issue and how helpful they can be during the first response. Creating an efficient customer support team is the first step in building a customer-centric business. Regardless of how good your product is, there are bound to be areas where the customers or prospects need help. An efficient customer support team not only helps addresses the issues faced by these individual customers, but is the first step in building a loyal customer base. So how do you go about building an efficient response team? Here are a few tips:

Benchmark First Response Time : Before you embark on your assignment to build an efficient team, you should know where things stand now. Benchmarking the time it takes for your team to provide its first response is absolutely critical. We are not talking about the automated response that customers receive in their inbox, but an actual response from a support team member. An efficient support team needs to respond in less than five minutes – when customers face an issue, they need someone to talk to NOW. A delayed response causes frustration and is typically the start of customer disappointment.

Benchmark Time Zones & Days : It makes financial sense to have a customer support team attend calls between 9-5 on weekdays. But to have an efficient response team, you need to be available when the customer needs you. To do this, benchmark the time zones your customers belong to, the time of the day you get most responses, and the days of the week that are most busy. Depending on what you sell, it is probable that you get most support requests on a Saturday evening. If that is the case, you should be staffing up appropriately during those days and times of the week.

Create Mandatory Fields For Routine Questions : Irrespective of the business you are in, the first response in a lot of cases tend to be questions about the product model, browser, operating system being used, etc. You can avoid this by making such routine questions as mandatory fields on your customer support request form. This makes it possible to provide quick and helpful response to your customers that need help.

Create Visual Help Docs : It is typical for a lot of customer help-desk teams to have ready-made help docs that answer standard questions. Various studies have shown that customers prefer visuals and videos to text-heavy documents. Invest in creating step-by-step guides as images or videos for various standard queries. Also, make this part of the process by teaching your customer support team to make new visuals and videos for customer queries. This way, your business will have helpful visual documents that target a significant number of help requests. To optimize your response time further, use a digital asset solution to properly store and tag the various videos and visuals you make for quick retrieval for future queries.

Live Chat & Desktop Sharing : Customers love the live chat option more than any other support platform. This is because the response is immediate and issues may be resolved much faster. However, provide this option only if you have the bandwidth to get a support executive attend to a customer in a matter of minutes. Also, depending on what you sell, include desktop sharing features in the live chat in order to be able to get access to the customers’ computer and make the necessary fixes.

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