Sales 101: Response Time Really Matters
One theme that you’ll hear again and again in conversations about poor customer service is a simple lack of responsiveness: things like “They never answered my questions!” and “They put me on hold for an hour!” and “It takes 5 emails to get a response!”
Being responsive to customers and prospects is one of the most fundamental ways you can improve your business. Here are a few examples.
“I changed my business mobile phone provider because they never answered my calls”
The quote above came from a customer who was using Approved Index to find a new business mobile phone provider. They were so frustrated that their calls were either not being answered, or not answered quickly enough that they had decided to take their contract elsewhere. The problem that most companies face is that their customer service teams aren’t able to keep up with the volume of calls.
Additional hires and significant telecom upgrades are expensive, and there’s no immediately measurable increase in revenue to offset the costs – however, there is a real boost to your bottom line. It’s always cheaper to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones, and the cost of repairing a bad reputation is significant.
Quick to call, quick to close
Another critical area where response time makes a difference is sales. Buyerzone.com recently surveyed and analysed the responses of several million buyers that they had worked with and found that speed-to-call was the single largest driver of lead conversion in the first 2 minutes after the lead was generated. Companies who were responding to their leads within one minute of receipt were able to achieve 391% improvement! Now of course achieving this extremely quick contact rate on a consistent basis could be a daunting task if not equipped with the right tools, but even if you miss the critical “2 minute window,” your chances of conversion increase by an average of 62% if called within 30 minutes, and 36% if called within the first hour.
In addition to being quick to call, this can have a big impact on how you distribute leads to your sales team: more frequent sharing of small groups of leads can help you respond more quickly to sales requests.
The non-response response
Sometimes it’s not possible to answer a customer inquiry as fast as you’d like: you need to do some research, a key decision maker is temporarily out of touch, or any of a thousand other delays can crop up.
In these cases, it’s worth sending an email that simply lets the customer know their request has been heard and you’re working on it. Auto-responders that send generic “thanks for the email” messages do not cut it — an email or a call from an actual customer service rep is needed to personally acknowledge they’re working on the problem.
Just reassuring customers that their concerns are being heard goes a long way towards maintaining good relationships.
