The services industry is one of the fastest growing areas of business that involves providing specific services to targeted clients and customers. This includes a wide spectrum of roles for professionals to fill out, examples of these roles can be abundantly found in retail, hospitality and fine dining industries. Service response time is an important metric in this industry and simply put, it is the period between when your customer makes a request and when you give the response.
In the service industry, an untimely or delayed response is the hallmark of bad customer service. Your customers, no matter what industry you operate in, want to feel valued and appreciated for choosing you above your competition. If they feel they’re not getting the treatment they deserve, they’ll be more than happy to take their business elsewhere to avoid your poor work ethic. Today we are going to learn how to achieve that through standardizing your IT service thorough IT Ops training and some online IT technical training. If a poor response time in dealing with customers becomes a pattern, you can rest assured that it will most certainly result in loss of revenue, customers, and even your potential customers if you develop a bad rep. Efficient, timely service is the key generating and retaining loyal customers.
Online Service
Rapidly evolving technologies of today provide businesses with various channels to find and sell to their customers online. Just as everywhere else, first impressions are always lasting, specifically how you respond and treat customers from the first meeting determines whether they will come back to you. For instance, you begin with a cordial greeting followed by an inquiry into what they are looking for and answering their queries promptly. Also, remember to minimize customer wait time by employing enough trained service providers to service your customers.
Digital Requests
Online mediums often come integrated with web-tools and email that give your customers the ability to get in touch with you quickly and easily. This is a great way of documenting the requests of your customers and creating a paper trail for evidence of proper correspondence by your employees at a performance review. Old fashioned companies despite including the feature to contact them on their website, disregard messages from their customers, some don’t even care to answer them. Digital avenues greatly expand your reach in the market, and digital leads deserve just as much attention as your regular customers. Forward-thinking companies, on the other hand, provide live online support to their customers providing immediate resolution to their problems.
Telecommunications
While some customers prefer to leave a message on your website or leave an email, there are some customers that prefer to speak to a representative of your business. Note that if you are in the service industry, if a customer calls you, they have some urgent need they want you to address, for example, the Banking sector. So remember to have phone support readily available if your services deal on a higher volume. This should be followed by strict monitoring of your customer service department, randomly select an employee every hour to gauge the level of service they are providing to your customers. Stay alert as you cannot afford a drop in the level of service you provide to your customers.
How to Standardize and reduce service response times
As we’ve discussed in much detail, there is a direct benefit to your business for reducing customer response times. To help you begin, we’ve selected a few easy-to-implement and effective techniques you can use to rapidly respond to your customers.
Implement customer service software
If you’re not already using a customer service software, it is time to consider implementing one and using it. If you’re one of those companies that are still using the shared mailbox to manage hundreds of customer request emails, there is no better way to improve your customer response time than to invest in a customer service management software. This IT customer service software catalogs every conversation and interaction with your customers, from the day they become your customer to the day they stop. This gives you the opportunity to look back giving you an in-depth understanding of their problems, identify the products they most frequently use, allowing you to respond appropriately.
In extension to this, implementing the right tools for customer service will mean that you invest a bit in your employees too. IT Ops Training and certification such as ITIL foundation and CompTIA A+ will go a long way to benefit your bottom line and definitely be much faster than your shared mailbox.
Use email Auto-responders
Sometime to save a relationship with your customer, all they need to know is that their email has been received and acknowledged. Only when the customer feels that their queries and complaints have been ignored that a negative sentiment regarding your company takes root and poison your relationship. Perhaps the best to put your customer at ease and letting them know that you’ve received their email is using auto email responders. Where a standard message is sent to every customer that contacts you. Less than 10% of the companies use this life-saving technology, why not become one of them?
Categorize and prioritize the emails you receive
One of the fastest ways to respond to an ever-accumulating pile of emails is to quickly categorize them according to subject matter and urgency. Prioritizing in this manner allows you to effectively respond to emails, putting customers with urgent needs first and not getting bogged down with simple FAQ queries. By concentrating on specific subject areas one at a time, you can achieve major response time efficiencies compared to answer them one by one, which in most cases tend to inefficient and time-consuming.
Reducing the time period in which you respond to your customers is critical to a business. Not only can it make and amplify your brand’s reputation but make your customers happy and more likely to recommend you.