Artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting the customer service industry by reducing the burden on human agents. One of the most tangible ways to upgrade customer experience is by providing resolutions to your customers faster. While achievable by humans alone, things often get tricky if your business is growing rapidly. In this blog, let us look at how we can leverage Artificial Intelligence to prioritize customer needs and improve the resolution journey.
What is Customer Service Response Time?
Widely used in Customer Support and Service, Response Time is the time that is elapsed between when the customer raised an issue and when a support team member first addressed the raised issue.
Considered a major contributor to a company’s ability of customer retention, Response Time is an important metric to track and improve upon because a fast response makes your customers feel acknowledged and important. They want to know their business is valued and appreciated, even more so because they know that they can take their business elsewhere because of the hyper-competitive nature of the industry.
Unfortunately, a study shows that 62% of companies do not respond to customer service emails. While companies often try to keep their customers’ user experience their top priority, here are some reasons why things can get out of hand –
- Agent Performance: One of the biggest factors that might be impacting your response time is the lack of informed Customer Service agents. Issues that could possibly be resolved in 10 minutes can take hours or even days if you’re agent is not well trained and is struggling to find the right and quick answers.
- Lack of Technology: In today’s day and age, not leveraging technology can set companies up for failure. Not utilizing a robust Helpdesk, canned responses, or chatbot conversations can waste resources. If you receive 5-6 emails a day, you might get away with not needing a system like HappyFox Helpdesk, but as your business grows and customer needs increase, keeping a track of queries on emails can be daunting.
- Lack of KPI tracking: Management teams failing to track metrics and keeping their employees accountable is also a major factor in slowing down agents. For instance, not having clear visibility of what the priority is of your customer queries can lead to your agents to treat them as equals, failing to meet their SLAs.
How to improve your Response Time?
When it comes to customer service, time is most definitely of the essence. Here are some indisputable ways you can leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI technology) to reduce response times.
Improve your Response Time with Chatbots
Chatbots are an AI-powered and Natural Language Processing (NLP) backed software program that is designed to simulate human conversation. Allowing companies to deflect simple questions and repetitive tickets and drive better customer engagement, Chatbots can really streamline issue resolution processes. Easily to place on Website landing pages, Mobile apps, or even messaging apps like Facebook messenger, Virtual Assistants led chatbot experience are ensuring faster real-time response times, 24x7x365 in almost every industry like e-commerce, retail, BFSI, etc.
Encouraging self-service support to customers, chatbots are proving to be revolutionary in providing customers with accurate data and within seconds with instant responses. Slow response time can stem from follow up emails, finding the right data, long wait times, call transfers, and much more. But automation and AI-chatbot implementation can take care of that. Using conversational chats and preset responses and templates, resolution can come quicker with tickets even being solved at first contact. There are many more uses of chatbots. To learn more about other benefits of chatbots such as Lead Generation, Uninterrupted service, and to see if your business needs one, check out our blog or check out HappyFox’s AI-powered Chatbot platform.
Improve your Response Time with Business Intelligence tools
You can’t improve what you don’t track. Very essential to the smooth functioning of an organization, setting up KPIs and tracking them religiously can help you get ahead of the curve. Aligning your KPIs to business strategies can help you focus on improving your agent performance and customer satisfaction.
Sifting through stacks of data quickly, Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as HappyFox BI, are very effective in understanding your customer behavior and ticket patterns. This helps you keep track of the issues that you face often and make data-driven business decisions, like how to manage resources to meet the demand. Having a clear understanding and visual snapshot of the time your agents have been spending can also help you empower your agents well, thus enabling them to provide the best possible service to your customers, quicker.
Conclusion
When customers bring issues or concerns to a company, they are expecting a response that is not just quick but also accurate. According to Statista, 48% of consumers expect a response to social media questions and complaints within 24 hours. That is why successful companies across the globe are looking to invest in tools that leverage Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to find powerful customer support solutions to differentiate themselves from their competitors. If you’re in the same boat, get in touch with us to know how we can help you elevate your customer service.
