Improving Response Times for Customer Inquiries

australiacityguide

Hi, I manage Australia City Guide, a travel information website, and I’ve noticed that as our user base grows, our response times to customer questions and inquiries have started to increase. I’m looking for best practices or strategies to manage higher volumes of user queries effectively while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. How do other organisations handle scaling support without compromising response quality?

SarahMachon

I have a lot of experience with this. Are you running different shifts? And are you breaking customer queries into different tiers or categories?

I find the most effective system to get everyone fast responses and resolutions is to manage it like airport check-in queues. I determine what my expectation is for the team to get back to customers with a meaningful response (first response and next response), then I get the team to work together on user queries. I find individual ticket ownership highly ineffective when it comes to fast responses and resolutions. Instead I expect the team to work as one unit - to represent the company with one voice. You can still have individuality if your brand demands that, but at the end of the day customers want accurate and fast service. That's the most important thing, not if they spoke to Joe or Amy.

So I ask the team to take the oldest ticket first, no matter if they worked on it previously or not. Leave a solid trail of internal documentation so anyone can pick up an unresolved query and progress it. It really helps with cross-training and general collaboration also. The team becomes responsible for their metrics together. Less chances to "cheat" the system and more opportunity to learn from each other.

Another great thing I learned from my time at Slack was that we asked all support agents to prove in each ticket that they were human. We maintained insanely fast response times (under 15 minutes) so we were often asked if we were bots. The team had to show through their answers that they read the individual user's query, understood it and handcrafted a specific response that could not have been generic. Implement a quality check where you make sure that the team doesn't sound robotic. And establish a support culture where they are proud of being human and deliver service excellence. That goes a long way!

I hope that helps. Would love to hear how you get on.