Improve Customer Satisfaction Ratings — First Reply Time
When was the last time someone said “Oh, I’ve been put on hold and I absolutely love it!” Ahem..I can guarantee the percentage of that not happening is somewhere in the 98 percent and I won’t be talking about the weird ones in this article.
If your first reply time is longer than 3h, you might want to look into reducing that number down.
Clients don’t like to wait and nobody does for that matter. Why should they? They paid for your product/service and they expect it to work, and if it doesn’t, they want to you fix it for them.
Let’s take a closer look at why this might not work as you expect it to. Here’s five reasons why your first reply time is not up to speed:
You categorization if off
Your agents don’t know what they need to do
Your routing is not working
Your views are misleading
You’re lacking a team leader
Let’s look at each point to better understand the issues and maybe look into how these can be tackled one by one.
Categorization
Have you done a complete overview of all your business flows? Sometimes it helps if you just sit down and collect flows in a good old fashioned spreadsheet. I know it’s boring, but this can take you a long long way on the client satisfaction high way.
Unproductive agents
It’s not their fault. If the process is convoluted and unclear, agents won’t be able to deliver good client support. What you can focus on is seeing where they get stuck and why. Also, their flows are just as important as a client’s. They might need a training so they can understand the technical side of your customer success platform of choice. Please bare in mind that they will only be able to truly deliver once they have absolute clarity on what they need to do. To do this:
Have your business flows well documented
Translate flows into features in your customer success tool of choice
Train your agents by sharing these flows
What are your agents skills? Can they be separated into departments/groups and linked to some particular types of incoming tickets? This is what good business flow documentation should be able to point out.
Routing
Having your routing work well requires a maximum understanding of your business flows combined with a medium technological knowledge of how you can set that up.
Do you have a 3 month period of working with your customer success tool? No worries if you don’t, there’s plenty of documentation online that can help you achieve your desired results. There’s also the option of hiring someone to do it for you. Hello, my name is Dominic :)
Do you have your teams split into departments or groups? It’s useful to think about who will be able to answer what type of requests. Do you have a tiered escalation for different request types? It might be that some requests need to be handled by a more advanced skill level agent. This requires your low tiered agents to escalate to the more advanced ones.
Can you identify some particular types of incoming tickets? If so, you can direct those to the appropriate teams to deal with them, which leads us to the next question:
What business rules do you have setup? Trigger based? Time based? Both are great, an orchestration between the two is even greater!
Request viewing
How agents interact with the requests that they are assigned to is crucial. Ok, let’s consider that your routing is not amazing, neither your categorization is amazing, but if agents cannot have a clear view of what they need to work on, then you might have a big problem on your hands — unhappy clients. Not having a good overview of what’s going on, will create stress for your agents — which will be translated or felt by the receiving end — your clients, which will in return have a unsatisfactory experience. NOT COOL.
If agents have a good overview, then they might be able to jump into requests and handle them accordingly. There’s many ways of having a good overview:
The big POT — having a one place where everything is being dropped with either a team leader assigning everything to the appropriate team members or departments or all agents having access to the pot and assigning requests as they come in. This applies to small to medium companies — up to 5–10 agents.
Each department getting their requests directed to them. This requires you to have the routing done beforehand. It cannot work otherwise. This normally applies to medium sized companies for up to 10–15 agents.
The “to each their own” — having the business flow defined with a categorization in place and the routing well orchestrated so that each team and agent can clearly see what they are assigned to so that they don’t get distracted and are able to focus on helping your clients. This is for enterprise companies — my speciality — companies for a minimum of 20–25 agents.
Is this circle somehow starting to make sense or is it just me?
The team leader
You maybe need someone in your team that can have a minimal technical understanding of how your customer support tool works and who understands your basic flows. This, in return, can create a workable flow for small companies(up to 5 agents). The team leader is someone who can take on the role of assigning requests to the different team members and monitor request completion. They can also provide reporting to upper management.
For enterprise, the customer success manager has to be involved and has at least one team leader. Depending on the number of departments, there can be just as many team leaders.
Conclusion
The documentation for the above can be easily found online. However, if you don’t have 3 months available to read it and don’t want to become a customer success expert, you can hire one. Hi, my name is Dominic ☺️
Wanna chat with me? I don’t bite, bros, so send me an email at hi@dominiccx.com
Video about it: