Boosting Customer Experience With Faster Response Times

Let’s say your support center is getting hammered with repeat calls about a new product feature. Historically, the team would escalate, create a task force, and maybe update a knowledge base weeks later. With the tech available today, you should be able to unify signals from tickets, chat logs, and social mentions instead. This helps you quickly interpret the root cause. Perhaps in this case it's a confusing update screen that’s triggering the same questions. Instead of just sharing the feedback with the task force that'll take weeks to deliver something, galvanize leaders and use your tech stack to orchestrate a fix in real time. Don't have orchestration in that stack? Start looking into this asap. An orchestration engine canauto-suggest a targeted in-app message for affected users, trigger a proactive email campaign with step-by-step guidance, and update your chatbot’s responses that same day. Reps get nudges on how to resolve the issue faster, and managers can watch repeat contacts drop by a measurable percentage in real time. But the impact isn’t limited to operations. You energize the business by sharing these results in a company-wide standup and spotlighting how different teams contributed to the OUTCOME. Marketing sees reduced churn, operations sees lower cost-to-serve, and leadership sees a team aligned around outcomes instead of activities. If you want your AI investments to move the needle, focus on unified signals, real-time orchestration, and getting the whole business excited about customer outcomes....not just actions. Remember: Outcomes > Actions #customerexperience #ai #cxleaders #outcomesoveraction

The number 1 driver of customer satisfaction for accountants: Not: Technical ability Not: Your tech stack Not: Your website aesthetic It's answering the d*** phone. Responding to emails. Following through on [your desired comms channel] within [timeframe your client expected]. It isn’t a high bar these days, but simply being responsive and following through puts you ahead of the pack. 13 tips to standardize comms & align expectations: 1. Communicate a standard turnaround time. Doesn’t matter what it is, it just needs to exist. 2. Not all requests are created equal. Your turnaround time is your *acknowledgment* time. Many requests will take longer to resolve. 3. The only exception is when you’re OOO. So don’t forget your OOO, or pull in a teammate when you’re out. 4. Over-communication beats under-communication. Never be afraid to send a quick update, or a no-update update. 5. Don’t leave turnaround time up to your team to decide. For each role there’s a rule, and we’re all held to our turnaround time rules. 6. Your availability is the most scarce in your firm. If it isn’t, why won’t clients just go to you every time? 7. Design turnaround times to drive client behavior. For example an immediate call with an admin, same-day call with a staff, 72 hour call with the big boss. 8. No channel should jump the line. If you respond to that text, they’ll never follow the flow again. 9. Where possible trade synchronous work - let’s have a quick call to discuss - with asynchronous work - here’s a loom outlining my proposed solution, and a scheduling link if we still need to discuss. 10. In almost no situation should the big boss be taking unscheduled client comms of any kind. 11. Enable self-service wherever possible. Fetching docs from their own portal, paying an invoice online etc. 12. Integrate response times into how team members are incentivized. Be careful rewarding over-responsiveness, but keep a close eye on under-responsiveness. 13. Wrangle rogue channels. You make the rules about how clients can interact with your firm. Any comms outside those channels must be redirected. Clients are no different than mice in a maze. If they can get the cheese by texting you, calling you directly, they’ll never go through your team again.

Handle time is costly for contact centers. How do you cut it without crushing customer service? Here are 5 ways: 1. Fix your knowledge base Agents at one contact center couldn't answer 14% of customer questions. The knowledge base was outdated. Agents spent had to put customers on hold and search for information. Searching for answers = wasted time. 2. Prevent escalations One team identified the top 10 reasons calls were escalated from Tier 1 to Tier 2 support. Five of those call drivers were prevented by sharing more information with Tier 1 agents. Escalated calls = wasted time. 3. Eliminate survey reminders Call center agents ended each call by asking customers to take a survey. It was awkward and time consuming. Removing the prompt saved 10 seconds per call. Survey prompting = wasted time. 4. Upgrade listening skills Active listening helps agents quickly understand customers' needs and how they want to be served. Help your agents develop their listening skills so they can serve customers faster. Poor listening = wasted time. 5. Reframe handle time Most contact centers measure time per call. A more accurate measure is time per issue. If a customer has to call back about the same problem, the handle time for THAT call should really count on top of the original one. One contact center leader found that adding 1 minute per call to solve the problem on the first try reduced their overall time per issue by 5 minutes. Second calls = wasted time. Bottom line: Use these tips to cut handle time without hurting customer service. ✍️ What else would you add to the list?