An effective customer service strategy should be able to cover these 2 main things: delight customers with an outstanding experience, and at the same time, do that in the less time possible.

Impossible? Not at all.

If customers are becoming more impatient by demanding the quickest responses is because they are aware that companies are able to give them those responses using technology.

In fact, most customers will switch to another business if your response time is not fast enough.

Now you understand why customer responsiveness is so important?

Customer responsiveness indicates how fast and efficiently your company responds to its customers.

From a customer support perspective, it is the time taken by the agents to respond to your customers.

It’s important to note that customer responsiveness is more than just responding fast, it also involves the frequency and consistency in communication until the final resolution.

For example, it would be great if you can get in touch with your customers immediately after they reach out,  but it would all fade off if they don’t receive a speedy solution to their queries.

Finding the perfect balance between speed and quality is a big challenge for every customer support team.

However, a very important thing that many agents fail to do is not communicating an approximate time response and query resolution beforehand.

But, what happens when you manage different communication channels?

Sure, it’s great to count on emails and live chats, but with every channel, you need to have an appropriate responsiveness time; and of course, this time changes depending on each of them.

Let’s check this:

• Email

An answer to a question via email will be considered wonderful if it arrives within 30 minutes, but disappointing if it arrives three days later.

Of course, this depends on the urgency of the customer query, but don’t forget that for customers all their requests are urgent and important.

• Phone and Live chat

People reach out to phone and live chat support to an immediate response. Therefore, the average response time is 3 seconds and the latter is under 1 minute.

• Social Media

The average response time here changes across different platforms.

For instance, on Twitter no more than 1 hour is acceptable.

On Facebook and Instagram, the longest time response is 4-5 hours.  

Now, how can you improve customer responsiveness?

1. Understand your customers

It’s great to have different channels for communication, but naturally, customers will choose some above others, and it’s your job to find out which are those and why they choose them.

We recommend surveys and customer feedback forms to help you understand what customers expect in terms of wait times and to know if they were happy with the experience they had.

2. Provide consistent support experience

Providing support via different channels comes with the challenge of keeping a consistent experience without losing customer context across channels.

An omnichannel support solution like Freshdesk not only lets you manage multiple customer service channels from a single-window but will also help you provide a seamless and consistent support experience.

The customers can reach out to you via any channels and receive a contextual response without having to worry about which channel is the best to reach out to you.

3. Use canned responses, personalization, and self-support resources

Canned responses help you respond quickly to common customer issues with just a click. This allows you to save a lot of time the time without having to write the same messages or answers over and over again for different customers.

In addition, a customer portal or a knowledge base is a perfect resource for the customers to solve their issues on their own. Without having to wait to connect to an agent for every simple or common issue that arises.

This will reduce the number of incoming queries to the customer support teams, reducing agent load, and improving response times.

4. Train your employees

Nothing can beat a  workforce that was trained to understand the importance of customer satisfaction, and that is aware of the expected response time for every channel they use.

Your agent not only need to know the common types of customer service questions or issues raised on your business. They also need all the tools and training to answer them.

5. Trust technology

There are multiple ways that technology can help optimize and automate repetitive tasks in customer service. As a result, you will significantly improve your team’s responsiveness.

A technical support platform like Freshdesk is the best way to optimize your support process. This help desk software has helped hundreds of companies to prioritize the issues that need attention and bring all communication channels into one dashboard. Thus, agents don't have to constantly switch between many systems.

It also offers historical context and 360 view of every customer by tracking the customer journey across each channel and collaboration with other teams without losing context.

In addition, you can also power your helpdesk with automation to respond quickly to your customers. Automation will be hugely helpful to improve your customer responsiveness.

Freshdesk Omnichannel route automatically assigns messages, chats, tickets, and phone calls to the right agent based on their agent loads. It also scans the customer inquiries and assigns it to the right team depending on the issue type and the channel they contacted you with. Furthermore, it will also update the progress of the issue to the customers.  

How can we help you?

If you are interested in implementing this tool in your company, our team of experts can guide you through the entire process. You will also receive advice so that you can make the most of its features and achieve your goals.