Customer support plays a major role in helping you engage a relevant audience and retain your existing customers.
A customer’s journey with you doesn’t end as soon as they purchase your products or services. It starts from there.
For as long as they are your customers, they’ll come to you to seek answers to their questions and find solutions to their problems.
It’s your responsibility to be there for your customers round the clock and help them make the most of the purchased products or services.
This fosters an unparalleled customer experience and boosts customer satisfaction significantly. As a result, your customers stay loyal to you and avoid seeking alternatives as soon as they start facing problems with your solutions.
If you’re unsure about whether or not you should be offering 24/7 support to your customers, here are a few noteworthy reasons that may help you make up your mind:
1. Customer Expectations
Your customers expect a quick response when they face issues with your solutions and are in need of your assistance.
This is the reason why 63% of people prefer brands that have a live chat feature available on their respective websites.
This shows that people can reach out to the respective brand at any time they want and get their issues resolved.
Nowadays, people aren’t interested in submitting their queries through tickets and waiting for their turn to get them resolved. They demand instant answers. And if you’re unable to be there for them when they need you, they won’t mind considering other options.
So, in order to meet the expectations of your customers, it’s important that you are available for them 24/7 in order to cater to their respective queries.
2. Better Retention
If you compare customer acquisition with retention, the cost of acquiring new customers is 5x higher.
This means that you should do whatever you can to make your customers stay and continue using your products or services.
It’s a no-brainer that your competitors are just waiting for you to make a mistake when it comes to providing your customers with seamless experiences.
The moment you take your eye off the ball, your competitors are going to outmaneuver you and steal your customers by offering them better deals.
To maintain lasting relationships with your customers, you have to offer them a hitch-free experience and instant solutions to their problems. For that, it’s best to be available for them whenever they need you.
3. Word of Mouth
Offering 24/7 support to your customers breeds loyalty. Not only do your customers keep using the solutions you offer, but they also recommend your products or services to others. This fuels word-of-mouth and creates a buzz around your brand.
When people are looking to buy products or services online, around 99.9% of them seek reviews before making a buying decision.
So, fostering brand loyalty and making your customers recommend your solutions to others paves the way for you to engage a relevant audience and attract new leads.
Being there for your customers when they need you may transform them into your brand advocates. As a result, they promote your solutions for you and help you grow your business by leaps and bounds.
4. Efficiency
Catering to the queries of your customers as you receive them helps a lot in maximizing your efficiency.
If you offer customer support at a certain time of the day, it doesn’t mean that you will stop receiving queries from your customers.
Your customers are going to reach out to you in one way or another, whether it’s through offline chat messages or emails.
This creates a backlog for you. So, the next day when you’re active for customer support, you will have to deal with pending queries first before moving on to the ones you receive in real-time.
This may be a stressful experience for your customer service representatives and may even lead to unpleasant confrontations with customers.
Customers demand instant answers. So, asking them to wait while you deal with the pending queries isn’t going to cut it.
So, it’s best that you cater to the concerns as they are reported to you. And for that, it’s best that you stay active 24/7.
5. Time-Zone Conflicts
Different regions follow different time zones. So, when you are active during a certain time of the day to offer support, it may cause problems for your international customers.
When you’re operational in different regions, it may be hard for you to educate all your customers about the time-zone difference.
To be honest, even if you manage to do that, customers are less likely to care when they face issues with your products or services.
Your customers will expect you to fix the issues for them as soon as possible. So, the last thing they’re going to do is consider the time-zone difference.
However, when you’re available 24/7, you become immune to such problems. Whether it’s your local or international customers, you’re always there for them, which fuels the growth of your business beyond regional boundaries.
Final Words
There you have it: the five reasons why you should offer 24/7 support to your customers.
Retaining customers is one of the biggest challenges companies face, irrespective of the industry they operate in.
The competition has become more intense. Plus, the customers have been more demanding than ever.
The only way to make your customers stay and continue using your solutions is to ensure that they are able to leverage your products or services to their fullest and encounter no problems doing so.
So, it’s important that you are there for them 24/7, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
