It hardly takes a few days for you to get regular calls from your customers. But suddenly you notice that many customers have entered the complaining mode. You aren’t sure why your customers are frustrated with your service even after providing 24/7 support services via calls.
Did you catch as to what went wrong?
Well, its the perfect example of what you shouldn’t do. And in case you feel that you need to understand it better, then let’s bifurcate the situation for you.
First, the business in question only thought of giving call support to its customers. Why restrict your support process with just one platform for customer communication?
Second, once the customer base grew for the business, the owner still decided to stick with call support. Well, it could be because call support helps you to understand the reaction of the customers and what they want in real-time. But understand this, one agent can take up one call at a time.
So the question is, will it be feasible to make the customers waiting for so long in a call queue?
Technically, no.
Just imagine, if New Yorkers spend an average of 6 minutes and 51 seconds waiting in a store, then how long do you expect a customer to be on call with an agent?
I’ll answer that for you. It just takes 20 seconds on call! Customers can easily lose their patience if the waiting time is stretched for more than 20 seconds.
Understand this; customers are the life and blood for any business. And, if you want your business to earn good revenues, then you need to ensure that customer waiting time is brought down.
One of the studies by Forrester Research indicates that customers equate quick response time with a satisfactory experience. Forty-one percent expect a response to their inquiries within six hours, but only 36 percent of business meet that standard.
There is a window of opportunity here to stand out among your competitors by simply improving your response time. For a whopping 92 percent of respondents, the highest satisfaction in customer support comes from Live Chat. There is no disputing the fact that live chat for WordPress is a surefire way of reducing customer waiting time, and in turn, boosting your brand image.
Here is a rundown on how to reduce response time for at least 24 percent of your customers using the WordPress live chat plugin.
Calculate average first response time
You may either want to improve existing live chat experience or add live chat to WordPress website to diversify customer support process. However, the very first step in this direction is to get a reality check on your present stand. The best metric for judging that is the average FRT (first response time). For this, you need to collect two key data parameters from your customer support team:
- Total time taken to respond to customer queries in a chosen time duration
- Total number of responses sent to customers in a specific time period
Of course, the chosen time duration must remain the same for both the metrics. You can look at the data for a day, week, or even a month, for this purpose. The longer the time duration, the clearer the picture you get. Now, divide the total time taken to respond by the total number of responses, and the resulting figure in your average FTR.
In a lot of WordPress Live Chat plugin versions, the FRT calculation process is automated. This means you can get valuable information without investing hours trying to do it manually. You can also get the average FRT for individual support executive or different support teams by simply entering relevant information such as reporting period, team or department.
Needless to say that the lower the FRT, the better your support service fares among your customers. The idea is to work toward constantly lowering that number to be able to reduce waiting time for at least 24 percent of your customers.
Shorter Chat duration
How long do you think a customer prefers to be on chat?
Well, it totally depends on the type of question they’ve come up with. However, chat duration is another metric to learn how customer waiting time can further be reduced. As a general rule of thumb, shorter chats indicate efficient handling of customer questions or issues, and longer ones reflect scope for improvement.
You need to make sure that
- Chat interactions are brief
- Agents or live chat operators keep the chat conversation more concise
Doing so will help you ensure that chat operators get to:
- Understand problems faced by the customers
- Communicate a resolution effectively
- Keep the support queue moving
All these help to reduce customer waiting time at your website.
Proactive live chat support
When you add live chat to WordPress, you get a small chat icon on your web pages. Customers or visitors can click the icon if they need support regarding any of their queries or issues. But understand this, a customer or even a visitor would prefer to be approached rather than reaching out to a business first.
In short, even when you have a live chat for your WordPress website and operators are still implementing the reactive support process, then probably you need to help them change their approach.
Ask them to track visitor activities by monitoring them in real-time. Doing so will help your operators initiate a chat through the software in strategic moments. And such proactive approach will help you build a sense of liking among your customers and website visitors. Plus, the use of proactive live chat support will help you reduce response time and keep customers delighted.
Why Reducing Waiting time matters
Fast response time matters because it makes the customer feel important. Speed in customer support service sends out the message that you are a business that cares for the needs of its customers, and that image goes a long way in building brand loyalty.
With so many alternatives available, your customer won’t think twice before switching loyalties if they don’t feel valued. That’s why reducing wait time should be a top priority for businesses while improving the customer support process. It will help to increase the number of returning customers effectively.
Fortunately, the answer to ‘how to reduce response time’ lies in honing the finer nuances of your support services. It is things like:
- Reducing response time
- Ensuring faster resolution
- Keeping chats brief
- Focussing on customer happiness
That do the trick and bring down the wait time on your WordPress website for close to 24 percent of your customers.
