Providing good customer service is without doubt one of the most important factors in retaining customers. Indeed, a report by Right Now found that 82% of customers stopped doing business with a company because of a negative experience. One of the ways to give top-notch service is to provide speedy customer problem resolution in live customer support.

The issue with this, especially for smaller businesses, is that concentrating on speed can put pressure on employees. Which in the long run may increase resolution time and lower the quality of service offered overall.

Luckily there are ways to increase customer service speed without increasing stress:

Pre-chat Questions

A pre-chat question is a useful automated feature that can reduce customer problem resolution time overall. A short question is asked to visitors before they start chatting, to capture important information such as name, contact information or order details. This allows employees to get straight to the core of an issue without wasting time on paperwork. They can also be used to find out the nature of the customers problem so that they speak to a team member from the right department without delay.

Train, Train, Train

Make sure each member of your team is up to date with product knowledge and frequently asked questions. This will ensure they can help clients out quickly and effectively without getting flustered. Make use of metrics to monitor the most common issues of the moment and update your staff accordingly.

Solve It in One

A sure-fire way to delight your customers and keep them coming back for more is to have a high first contact resolution rate or FCR. This is the amount of customer service issues that you resolve at first contact. A study by Oracle found that a 1% increase in FCR resulted in a 1% increase in customer satisfaction. Clearly this should be a big part of your customer retention strategy. Using quality live support software can help you to keep this metric high without the stress.

Smart Tip:
Xeno’s auto ID feature gives you a host of information about a customer as soon as they visit your site, including their personal name, location, email and company name. Knowing this in advance helps you to nail problems first time as it ensures the customer is passed to the relevant staff member that can help in their area of business.

Chatbot

A smart chatbot can take pressure off your team in a number of ways. It can act as your company’s smart sales assistant, solving problems that don’t require a human interaction. It can also act in a similar way to the pre-chat questions, drilling down to the bedrock of the problem before passing the query to a relevant team member.

The Tortoise and the Hare

We aren’t saying that you should take your sweet time when it comes to customer service. But there is a lot to be said for optimizing your customer retention strategy and making it as easy as possible for your staff to help clients, stress-free. This in turn will result in greater speed. Aside from staff training, investing in quality live support software is one of the smartest things you can do to make life easier for your staff. Xeno has a wealth of features to do just that. Including a smart chatbot, shared team inbox and predefined responses. What’s even better is that you can get all of this for free.