Council Post: How To Avoid Delays With Your Remote Customer Support Team

Marketer, social media influencer, and CEO of Bella All Natural, a vitamin store chain in Los Angeles.

In all of customer service, there’s one metric that stands out above all the rest in terms of importance. More important than satisfactory resolutions. More important than call resolution times. What is it? First response times. The faster your customer support team can respond to inquiries, the more satisfied your customers will be in general. Even in situations in which the resolution is poor, at least it was fast, and that’s something.

Many companies, particularly small businesses, don’t have the luxury of keeping staff on hand 24/7. They often turn to outsourcing, a contract with remote support companies that provide teams and scripts to handle support. So, when you’re dealing with a remote support team, what can you do to minimize delays and focus on responding as quickly as possible to an inquiry?

Establish Multiple Channels

One of the easiest things you can do to reduce delays is establish multiple support channels. If everyone has to wait for an email or a support ticket to be answered, you end up with one long queue and no sense of priority, scale or importance. Sure, some ticketing systems allow for automatic priority assignments based on topic or context, but many do not. Even then, putting everything in a queue allows small delays to cascade through the entire queue, delaying everyone.

The more support channels you have available — and monitored — the faster you’ll be able to respond to customer inquiries. What channels should you make available?

• Support Agents: Many support emails simply redirect to a ticketing system, but you can make them more responsive by establishing frontline support agents to monitor them, solve the low-level problems and forward the rest to the internal ticketing system.

• Phone Support: Phone support is decreasing as other support channels increase in popularity and as younger generations choose to avoid phones in general. Still, keeping phone support open as an option allows for near-immediate response times. I recommend avoiding phone trees as much as possible, as they can be frustrating for users to navigate.

• Live Chat: Setting up a live chat, either generally across your website or specifically in your support section, allows interested users to reach out to an agent from their computers at any time. I’ve observed that live chat is the fastest growing support channel because of the digital fluency of younger customers and relatively fast response times.

• Social Media: Facebook offers Messenger as a channel for customer support, which you can augment through the use of chatbots. Twitter is well-known as a go-to platform for customer service. Empowering your social media team to handle support inquiries is a powerful technique to reduce response delay.

• Direct Tickets: While most or all of your channels should funnel into a ticketing system to manage everything your front-line workers can’t solve immediately, offering customers the option to file a ticket if they don’t need an immediate response is a great way to encourage self-filtering by priority.

The more channels you can keep open and active, the better you will be at responding quickly.

Organize And Filter Inquiries

Part of establishing fast and responsive customer service is appropriately funneling inquiries to the right people. Each channel should have some method for filtering inquiries to the appropriate team to respond. 

For example, a common feature of live chats (and Messenger chats through Facebook) is a simple chatbot that asks for the context of the inquiry. This allows a user to describe their problem and then be transferred to low-level support, high-level support or sales, according to the context.

Each channel should have some means of filtering, whether it’s contextual based on what a user says in their ticket or reactive with an employee doing the front-line filtering.

Expand Windows With Clear Communication

We all know support times can vary depending on the volume of inquiries and time of year. Be upfront with how long it might take for a response to a support inquiry. This does two things.

First, it establishes a baseline. If you say it takes, on average, an hour to respond to a Facebook message, they know what kind of window they should expect for service. Phone support is where this can be extremely important, as no one likes to be left on hold for an extended time with no idea how long they’ll be stuck there. 

Second, it broadens the window of what is a pleasant experience. If a user expects an immediate response to a live chat and has to wait 10 minutes before someone responds, they’ll be mad. If you tell them it takes about 20 minutes for someone to respond and then respond in 10, they’ll be pleased you got to them as quickly as you did. It’s all about framing.

Use Autoresponders (Cautiously)

Automatic responses, phone trees and chatbots all serve a similar purpose: they allow for self-service support with a guided experience and manage expectations for support when it isn’t generally available. I recommend using them only when necessary, during extremely high volume times (such as around the holidays) or when your support team is otherwise not available (the holidays themselves). 

Just remember that many customers want support from a human, not a robot, and they will reject dealing with an autoresponder. That’s why I recommend minimizing how often you use them as much as possible.

Promote Self-Service

While some users wish to avoid self-diagnosing their issues, many prefer to avoid interacting with support whenever possible. Provide processes that guide users through describing their issues and diagnosing their problems, then redirect them to useful steps to solve their problems, with recourse if those steps don’t work. 

This helps lower the delay between inquiry and service by filtering out those who can solve their own problems, reducing ticket volume and allowing a smaller staff to handle inquiries. From there, all you can do is make sure you have an appropriate number of support agents available for the volume you need to be addressed.

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