9 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness

⏱ Reading Time: 9 minutes

Excellent customer responsiveness and customer service are vital parts of a successful business. When customers feel heard and valued, they will trust the company and spend more money on it. However, if customer service and responsiveness are poor, consumers tend to stop connecting with that brand altogether.

🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth🚀

A way to keep your customers and make them your loyal buyers is to invest in outstanding customer service and improve customer responsiveness. However, before you make the necessary changes to better your services, you need to know what customer responsiveness is.

What Is Customer Responsiveness?

When a customer reaches out to your brand’s customer support, how long do your team members respond to a query? The speed and quality of your customer response are what defines customer responsiveness. This may not look like it can significantly affect your company, but how your customer service team responds reflects your overall image.

Emails from customers which take hours or days to respond to leave behind a bad impression on your audience. Consequently, the outcome of this situation is that most likely the customer will not return and will take their business elsewhere.

Customer responsiveness not only applies to email replies but also answers to phone and social media comments and queries. A survey shows that 32% of customers expect a response from social media customer support within the 30 minutes of them reaching out. Additionally, 42% of consumers anticipate being entertained by customer support within 60 minutes.

Picture 1. How fast do you respond to your customers?

Importance of Having Outstanding Customer Responsiveness

If your customers are not satisfied with your team’s customer responsiveness, they won’t become returning customers. Therefore, it’s essential to be aware of your audience’s issues and questions. And most importantly, your team should be treating each customer as if they were the best customer they’ve had.

Repeat customers are profitable. If they are satisfied, they will keep purchasing from your company. Additionally, they will buy more and they’ll buy often. According to one study, repeat customers are accountable for 40% of the average store’s annual revenue. It’s essential to have fantastic customer service to make sure your customers come back.

As a consumer, you want to feel that the business you support cares about you and not just your money. On the other hand, when the company doesn’t respond to your email on time, you’ll feel like you don’t matter to them or that you are not valued.

As reported by a Forrester study, 73% of United States online adults say that the best thing a company’s customer service can do is value a consumer’s time.

 Read 8 Tips for Generating Return Customers to Your eCommerce Business

Picture 2. Outstanding customer responsiveness is nowadays a must

9 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness

Now that you’re fully aware of the customer responsiveness’s benefits, what can you do to improve your brand’s customer responsiveness? Here are some ways how you can enhance it:

1. Figure Out Why Your Customer Service Is Doing Poorly

You need to know where your weak points are in your customer service. Meaning, before you fix what is broken, you need to identify it. Do you need more employees to tend to your customer service needs? Does your website need an update?

First study how your customer service process flows and distinguish what your main issues are. To be able to improve customer responsiveness, acknowledge which parts of your business need care and attention.

Read How To Improve Customer Experience With Data

Picture 3. Determine the weak points of your customer service

2. Make a Customer Response System

From inquiries to reviews, every customer interaction is essential and must be answered or acknowledged. For you to be able to thread all customer responses, you need to be strategic and make a system. As a starting point, you can allot a specific time slot in which your team can solely respond to customers.

3. Talk to Your Social Media Audience

Customer service via social media is where companies either succeed or fail. First, you need to recognize that there are different platforms for your business. There’s Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and many more. Consequently, make the most out of these platforms by using it to connect to your audience. Social media communication with your customers builds trust.

If interacting with your customers via social media seems like a large task for your team to handle, you can outsource social media experts. They can do this task for you.

In this day and age, it’s important not to ignore the power of social media presence. So for instance, if your business doesn’t have a social media account, you can pick two platforms that will work best for you and your audience. You don’t have to be on every single platform.

Additionally, on Twitter, people can talk about your brand without your account being informed. In this Conversocial report, it says that only 3% of Twitter users tag a brand to ask for help. Moreover, 37% of tweets mentioning brands are customer-service related.

There’s a significant number of consumers that don’t tag when mentioning a brand. This means that customers could be talking about your brand positively or negatively without you knowing. For you to find tweets that you aren’t tagged in, simply enter your brand/company name (or common misspellings of it) on the Twitter search bar.

Even if customers don’t address their concerns or feedback to your brand’s account, you need to listen to them and respond. This gives your company plus points and makes your audience feel seen and heard.

Read Social Media Customer Service Plan – Why Is It Important to Have It?

Picture 4. Invest in your social media customer service 

4. Invest in Tech-Based Solutions

A problem a lot of small businesses have regarding customer service is manpower. Their lack of employees can be the reason why excellent customer service is hard to maintain. Nowadays, there are different kinds of customer service softwares available to help you with customer responsiveness.

One example is a web chat software in which automated responses handle basic customer inquiries. With this additional feature, potential customers can be assisted in purchasing a product. Therefore, investing in tech-based solutions can lead to business income.

5. Hire a Winning Customer Service Team

The performance of your customer responsiveness depends on your customer service team. You need to have the right people with the right skills working for you. They should be trained to improve their skills and to be ready to handle any type of situation.

Your team should have the following skills:

• Compassion and patience – Your team will face different kinds of customers. Some may be angry, confused, and clueless. They need to be able to handle these cases kindly, patiently, and professionally.
• Excellent communication – Customer conversations shouldn’t end until the customer is satisfied with your service. To be able to relay this, your team should be confident with their communication skills.
• Knowledgeable – There’s nothing more annoying than a customer service representative being as clueless as the customer they are serving. Your team should know your product/service inside and out. If they don’t, they should inform the customer that they are going to check with the corresponding team. They shouldn’t relay incorrect information.  

If your team is doing a great job in satisfying and serving your customers, you can give them rewards and incentives for boosting the customer experience. This can motivate your team in achieving your customer service goals.

Read 15 Customer Service Skills of Great Customer Service Agents

Picture 5. Does your customer service team have all the necessary skills? 

6. Install CRM Programs

As a consumer, an aspect that can turn me off when communicating with customer support is relaying my concerns to different teams repeatedly. When your company has a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program, your team can manage customer data and build a relationship with your customers.

Benefits of having a CRM:

• Provides useful insights about your customers.
• Allows you to understand your customers’ needs so that you can give a personalized experience to each customer.
• Sales and service teams can be on the same page when handling customers. This can eliminate confusion between teams.

CRM is a strategy that streamlines your company’s relationship and interactions with your customers. When a customer feels like they have a good relationship with a company, they will trust the brand and not stray to competitors.

7. Maximize Omnichannel Communication Services

As a brand in the modern age, your customers should be able to access your business in different forms. By doing so, the quality of your customer service should be consistent along with all these platforms.

Here are some multi-channel services you can try:

• Mobile-ready customer support – Customer support pages and features on your website should be mobile-compatible to cater to on-the-go customers.
• Social media – Don’t ignore social media complaints and queries. Connect to your consumers on social media by improving your response time and providing effective solutions.
• FAQ pages – For minor issues and questions, your audience often looks for solutions by themselves first before contacting customer support. Provide a clear and concise FAQ page on your website to solve common problems.

When you have all these channels implemented to your business, your company’s reliability and reputation will improve.

Read Omnichannel Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage

Picture 6. Omnichannel customer service integrates many different contact channels

8. Personalize Messages and Replies

When a customer asks for help or inquires, they expect that a person from customer support will assist them. However, if your team mindlessly sends out a generic response as an answer to your customer, your audience may feel unimportant.

According to Forbes, 96% of marketers say that personalized messages and replies improve the brand-customer relationship. Some ways for you to personalize messages and replies are to use the recipient’s name, use an informal and friendly tone, and use the customer’s native language.

9. Provide 24/7 Customer Support

If you have a large customer base, customer response rate is very important. Allot a customer support department where employees can work in shifts. If you think that this can cost a fortune, you can always outsource to freelancers. Outsourcing your customer service team can save you rental space money.

A feature you can also explore is live chat. Customers prefer interacting with customer support in real-time rather than wait for an email acknowledging their issue. In a research done by Super Office, “41% of customers expect live chat on your website.” It is also proven that companies that use live chat get an increase in their revenue.

Picture 7. Availability is one of the determining factors of good customer responsiveness

Wrap Up

It’s important to take note that how you handle customer responsiveness can have a significant impact on your business. If you handle customer responsiveness poorly, this can cause low customer loyalty and retention. However, if you play your cards right and show that your customers are heard and valued, your business can reap the benefits and increase its revenue.

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Kleona Amoyo is a freelance writer for Nettra Media on modern marketing. When she’s not pursuing her passion in writing, you can find her doing yoga, crocheting, journaling, or laughing at memes on her phone.