4 Tips for Managing Customer Service Queues: Key to Outstanding Customer Satisfaction
82% of consumers say the number one factor that leads to a great customer service experience is having their issues resolved quickly.
Whether it is a recently founded startup or a well-established multinational company, customer service is an immensely overwhelming task for all businesses. Sooner or later, every customer support team reaches a point where the volume of support tickets expands large enough that a new process is required. When help requests build up to a significant level, it starts overwhelming support agents, increases the waiting time for customers which eventually irritates them. All this leads your business to lose money. How can this be avoided? To help you out, we have pooled our knowledge of the industry and have come up with some smart solutions.
Leverage the power of cloud contact center
With global cloud marketing expanding at a significant pace, cloud contact centers have become a robust tool to deliver excellent customer support. A contact center virtually assists customers from the moment they research a product to the time they purchase it. Contact centers are designed to handle and manage massive volume of calls, and therefore, they offer a great customer service on your behalf. Moreover, they help you handle your customers’ request with their tailor-made solutions, like blended calling feature, real-time analytics, optimizing efficiency, etc.
Reduce response times
Customers hate waiting – we all aware of this fact. Reducing response time is necessary but how to do that? Fortunately, even incomplete responses satisfy your customers even if you do not solve the problem quickly. For example, an acknowledgment mail by you to customers can make them more patient and wait for a complete response. A quick confirmation that you have received the request helps to reduce the queue significantly. How? If a customer who contact your customer support via email and don’t get a reply for some time, they start doubting that if their request has reached to the support team. While waiting for a response, they may start calling you on the phone or reach you through other channels. It not only increase customer’s waiting time but also make them more impatient. Therefore, never leave your customers in limbo. Instead, take help of cloud telephony to address their requests.
Stick to first come, first serve
You may find it tempting to prioritize customers’ requests to cut short their long periods. However, stick to first-come and first-serve method which is always considered the best. Don’t try to be better and fancier while ticketing queue management. Because, whenever you try to prioritize customer’s issues, every problem would seem to you more pressing than the earlier. It will only lead the earliest person spending more time waiting which is unfair.
Categorize your tickets
One of the efficient ways to manage your ticket queue is to categorize your support tickets with categories. This way you will be able to pay attention to similar types of support tickets. Once you finish creating categories, you can assign specific support agents who are best able to assist customers under a specific category. Tickets can be separated by priority, product type, customers, types of issues, etc. Division of tickets according to a department is also a smart alternative.
You may use a combination of different solutions to address your support queue. There is no magic way available, and every trick has its upsides and downsides. Test different approaches to enable your support team to find the right fit so that you can achieve better customer satisfaction.