Gone are the days that I can wait a day or two before responding to a message. If my family or friends text me, they need — more like expect — a response in a matter of seconds. I’ve had my fair share of angry texts about not responding within a minute or two. It’s all very frustrating until you’re on the other end of it waiting for someone to respond to your own text message.
For the Love of Speedy Communication
We live in a world of instant communication and always expect results. And we expect them fast. If your customer service doesn’t get results fast, you’ll instantly have some very unhappy customers.
When you make customers wait in a queue to receive an answer, they’ll already be fed up with customer service. Those representatives are then fighting an uphill battle to get those customers happy again.
“Everybody has a need for speed and you actually make your product, or service, or services more attractive when you do them fast.” — Brian Tracy
One of the top reasons customers leave a company and/or provide poor comments about a company is slow service. On the flip side, companies that practice speedy communication and customer service are more likely to gain and retain a larger number of customers. This applies to every single industry.
The good news about speed? You control that entirely. The bad news? Doing it consistently is definitely not easy. Speedy communication requires commitment from the business, which often means adding resources. But trust me, it’s worth it. Customers appreciate and respond to speedy communication and service. Here’s why.
It Makes Them Happy
Everyone knows what it’s like to be hangry. When you’re at a restaurant waiting for food when you’re hangry, it seems like time is moving way too slow. Speed is of the essence when you’re working at a restaurant.
It’s also of the essence when it comes to customer service. Your customer will just get more and more frustrated the longer it takes for you to serve them.
When you serve your customers in a timely manner, you end up with satisfied customers. If you make them wait forever to get what they want and need from you, you simply end up with disgruntled clients who, despite the quality of your product, will not want to deal with you ever again.
In this day and age, quick customer service is expected. Lindsey Pearce, a Skipio Customer Success agent, understands that. If someone isn’t available to answer chats online immediately, customers quickly get frustrated. Even though the customer success team is pretty small now, Lindsey said they work hard to keep it organized and running smoothly.
“It’s important to have someone available to chat all of the time. We’re a small team, and people who call in we will often hear from again, so it’s important to handle them knowing you’ll hear from them in the future,” Lindsey said. “You have to build that trust with customers early on because you’ll hear from them often on the support team.”
Being available in a timely manner may not solve the problem a customer needs help solving, but it will help them feel like they can trust you and your company. And you want them to have a good experience because they will (hopefully) be sticking around for awhile. Don’t burn any bridges.
While service quality is very important, the speed of service still trumps all other aspects of customer service.
It Builds Trust
These are some of the things that run through a customer’s mind when we fail to respond in a timely manner:
- They are not interested in my business.
- No one is paying attention to me.
- They are hiding something.
It boils down to trust. One of the common misconceptions in customer service is that in order to answer a customer we need to have the correct answer.
Even if you don’t necessarily know the answer right then, getting back to them and being honest about what’s going on will leave your customer feeling very valued. Lindsey sees this first hand as a member of the Customer Success team. She has learned that being honest, open, and professional about what is going on is the best way to treat customers.
“You have to realize that sometimes you just won’t have the answers for things. It’s important to acknowledge that and let your customer know that. It’s much better to do that than make something up,” Lindsey said. “We had problems for a couple weeks… People were calling in a lot frustrated, and we just didn’t have an answer. So we made a resolution as a team what our answer would be. We worked with people and let them know we didn’t understand what was causing the problem necessarily, but we let them know we were actively working on solving the issue. Most of the time people just wanted to be heard.”
By quickly responding and just letting people know their complaints were heard, Lindsey and her team were able to make people feel more at ease. Validating the callers and then assuring them that help was on the way went a long way.
47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day of experiencing poor customer service.
It’s Good for Your Brand
Think of how speed transformed Amazon’s branding. The first word that comes to my mind when you think of Amazon Prime? Fast. You trust them when they say your package will arrive in 2 days.
Free shipping and two-day delivery has always been a staple of Amazon. Now with video streaming, we expect instant downloads. Even when Amazon Prime raises its prices, people stick around because they have benefited so much from the brand Amazon has cultivated.
Building your brand around speedy communication won’t go unnoticed (just look at Amazon). Lindsey put it this way:
“No one wants to work with a company where their questions go unanswered,” Lindsey said. “You must prioritize what customers’ needs are. But along those lines, don’t neglect the little things because those things will become big things. Even if a customers’ problems may not seem like a big deal, make them know that all of their problems matter.”
But the delivery is everything
Some companies hesitantly embrace speedy communication and customer service because they think that they may have to sacrifice service quality. Don’t do that. You need a tool to help you manage all your customers and communicate with them in a simple way: texting.
With a 98% open rate and 65% response rate, adding a text message service to your customer support channel not only speeds up your customer service but also keeps it extremely personal. And sometimes it can all be too much – running your business and working with your customers. That’s where a business process with texting automation comes in. You need something easy to use.
Stop getting frustrated working with unhappy customers. Give your customer what they expect from you – instant and speedy communication. Let your customers know you care. Build a company that people trust. Meet your customer expectations of speedy customer service. Use Skipio to do it all.
