It is known that COVID-19 transformed how businesses worked. The economy opened up, and customer communication dynamics revamped. Businesses today need to be open and responsive to customers. There is a need to communicate and be as transparent as possible. Customer experience is an agreed-upon differentiator for businesses. A huge part of customer experience is how responsive the business is. Customer responsiveness is thus a requisite in any business. A company needs to personalize communication and experience as much as possible to ensure customers are aware of all the changing equations. Let us know what customer responsiveness is, ways of response, how to improve customer responsiveness in 2023.

What is Customer Responsiveness?

Customer responsiveness is the capacity of the business to attend to or respond to customer service requests or doubts in a time-bound manner. The idea is to reduce the time taken to respond to customer questions and lead to faster resolutions. Customer responsiveness will help improve customer experience and lead to customer success. A company that is accessible to customers and attends to their needs is one that more customers will be attracted to. If a customer does not receive a response within the expected time, they might take to social media and post reviews or ratings.

Pillars of customer responsiveness

Here are the pillars of customer responsiveness-

• Quality of customer response
• The quickness of the reply to company
• Medium of the response

Top Ways a business can respond to Customers in case of queries

These are some of the tools that business can use to communicate with customers:

Email

In an email, the response wait time is over 10 hours. In some businesses, it might be a practical choice. It is a popular option for customers who prefer written communication that they can refer back to.

Phone Call

Phone calls are another popular method to communicate with customers. If the customer has an existing relationship with a customer service executive, a phone call is the simplest way to proceed.

Social Media

Social media is growing as a popular communication platform. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have different response times. These are usually lower than email response rates.

Text messaging

Text messaging is another often-used customer communication technique. In this, the customer texts the company executive about a problem and hopes for an answer.

Live Chat

This chatbot system is another widely used method to respond. In this, the customer gets a response in under a minute. If the live chat system can detect the answer, it is even simpler for the customer to know the answer to their query.

Let us now look at the various ways to improve customer responsiveness in 2023

How to improve customer responsiveness in 2023

Know Customers better

Customers evolve with time. From the stage of onboarding to advocacy, one can see a sea change in customer behavior. If you know customers better, you can adapt to the response rates they need. Customers have different needs at different points in time. For example- A customer might prefer resolution by email while another might prefer a phone call.

Keep customer goals in mind

All customers have some goals. For some, it might be time-bound. Take, for instance, a food delivery app that needs to know if the customer got the package or not. If they are facing some problems knowing the status, they need a time-bound response. Hampering their goals can lead to bad reviews from them.

Utilize technology

Leveraging the benefits of technology to set up automation processes, chatbots, instant replies can help. You can also track all social media channels and set up alerts every time a question is posed. This can be for internal or private messages or comments. This will help streamline the process and enable tools to handle these questions via calls, messages, or chatbots.

Omnichannel experience for the win

A consistent customer experience is necessary. You cannot respond one way on one channel and change how you respond on another. You need to keep the customer context in mind always. In an omnichannel customer experience, you can offer consistent support across multiple streams. This will help customers be assured that you will respond to them irrespective of the medium or channel of communication.

Take self-support resources seriously

A resource or knowledge base is a great way to help customers stay informed. They can solve issues with self-help guides and books if they know they exist. In fact, many customers prefer self-service over reaching out to an agent. If they have access to a bunch of tutorials or videos that can help, they will decrease the load on customer support staff. This will only improve response rates and enhance customer satisfaction.

Have templates and canned responses ready

Templates in terms of what to respond to can also help you. For instance- If customers are expected to face an X issue, you can have a ready response that can be sent. This canned response reduces time and effort spent in drafting the same answers for customers.

Understand customer expectations

Another important aspect to note is customer expectations. What does the customer expect? What is the average time they are okay with waiting for? Which mode of communication do they prefer? Is this their only problem? Would customer expectations hamper our response strategy?

Ascertain the goals you want to achieve in customer response time

In many cases, companies hope they can achieve 100% success in response times. This is not possible. Emails can get lost in a bunch of emails, or a phone call can be missed. All this can reflect badly for the company. So, to do that, you need to have goals in mind. Metrics like the number of responses per agent, average response time, ticket source, time spent on ticket, etc. can enable a better understanding of responsiveness.

Keep employees in the loop

Employees in the company need to be aware of common answers to questions. Having an education portal for employees gives them the awareness to learn and grow. This is especially important since customers might reach out to any employee on social media at times. A collective knowledge base shows that employees are invested in the organization process.

Listen to customers

Last and the most important tip is to listen to customers. In some cases, we end up explaining the product without actually noticing what the customer is asking for. This might take a lot of time and not provide the value desired for. To eliminate that, you need to listen to the customer and politely understand their viewpoint. Only then can you explain and solve their query.

Ensuring that customer service is speedy and based on quality are the primary keys to ensuring customer satisfaction and happiness. You need to increase customer loyalty by showing that you are responsive to their issues, complaints, or queries. Having a proper tech-enabled system can help solve the problem quickly and correctly.

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