A helpdesk plays a vital role in maintaining the overall progress of your business, irrespective of your niche or type of business.
According to a study, poor customer support can shatter the confidence of loyal clients and can cause them to feel less confident about conducting business with you again. This proves that the opposite of this fact can also be true, which means excellent customer support enables businesses to win the hearts of even the most skeptical customers.
In this regard, it is important to spend an appropriate amount of time with your customers in order to ensure they are completely satisfied with your business. For this purpose, businesses must focus on reducing response time and ensuring quality responses. Successful helpdesk software systems offer eficient response time managements so you can make your customers feel appreciated and content all the time.
A. What Is The Average Response Time?
The average response time is defined as the minimum time the customer representative takes to respond to tickets.
It is a common observation that customers usually want an immediate and timely responses, as it keeps them satisfied and happy when think about your brand.
According to the latest helpdesk ticketing research:
- The average ticket response time is 3 hours, 14 minutes, and 33 seconds.
- The median ticket response time is found to be 1 hour, 56 minutes, and 11 seconds.
This data was collected after consulting with 28 helpdesk professionals and gathering authentic information based on their experiences.
B. 12 Effective Ways To Reduce Average Support Ticket Response Times
In a recent study conducted to see the responses of customers regarding customer support, 77% of customers said that the most important part of customer service is when a company clearly values the customer’s time.
Therefore, we have gathered together the easiest and most useful ways to help you reduce helpdesk ticket first response and resolution times.
1. Meausure Average Ticket Response Time
The first and most important step is the calculation of the average response, which allows you to know how much improvement is required. According to Jayson DeMers of EmailAnalytics, "that which is measured gets improved.”
Thus, instead of looking for other options, you should consider how much time your agents take in responding to customers. This also provides you with insight regarding where you stand compared to your competitors.
2. Add AI Support Reps
Chatbots are irreplacable asset when it comes to handling a large number of customers at a time.
It is a fact that humans have limited capabilities and one staff member can only handle one customer at a time. Therefore, if you want to proceed with unlimited interactions at the same time, you should consider chatbots.
3. Proactively Support Customers
One of the surest ways to decrease pressure and reduce response times is to immediately solve a customer’s problem without opening a ticket. This is entirely achievable when customer support representatives are familiar with solving common customer support issues. It is a common observation that some customer support issues are very small and only require a little focus to solve them.
4. Recruit More Support Reps
Adding more customer support reps to your team may sound like the simplest solution, as it allows more customers to be serviced without delays. However, it may not always be the most cost-effective one.
Most businesses have observed a 30% increase in their sales by adding more staff members. However, it is critical to increase the knowledge base of the customer support representatives while also improving their collaboration level by providing them with additional training.
5. Invest More in the Onboarding Process
Sometimes staff members perform subpar customer support services. This inability arises from a lack of training and proper guidance on quick handling of customer issues.
According to Tasia Duske of The Great Guac Off and Arto Minasyan of 10Web, training is the key to reducing average ticket response times.
6. Divide then Specialize, and Conquer
Companies and businesses should focus on hiring well-trained and highly-knowledgeable customer representatives for handling difficult and technical customer issues. A lack of expertise can be the biggest hurdle.
More than 82% of customer support pros agree that having a designated lead team member for customer support is necessary.
7. Balance Personalization with Automation
According to an estimate, the use of AI and automated technology can reduce the average response time by 77%.
Automate.io revealed that keeping the average customer support response time below 15 minutes is a very big milestone that can only be achieved by using automation technology.
The best part about automation technology is that the ticket is automatically prioritized based on the complexity of the problem of the customer.
8. Establish 24h/7 Support
Support members often work remotely, but an interesting study has revealed that more than 92% of customer support members work directly from North America, while 42% and 36% work from Europe and Asia, respectively.
Almost all customer representatives agree that when a business focuses on providing information outside of normal business hours, customers feel more at ease and appreciative of the efforts.
9. Utilize AI Tools to Detect Response Time Issues
It is almost impossible to resolve slow response times if you do not know the cause. The use of AI allows a company to diagnose response time issues, which will further allow a company to gain an understanding for why they have poor response times.
In most cases, there is a dire need to monitor the performance of agents and see how they are performing. For this purpose, their training and learning about the importance of punctuality are crucial for support success.
10. Install an Efficient Helpdesk to Streamline Ticket Routing
The use of the latest and advanced customer support tools, such as Helpy, can help in the reduction of response times because of the use of AI to streamline the request handling. The ability to gain a clear insight into any part of your customer journey at any time is extremly valuable when your agents need to address and solve individual problems successfully.
According to Tracy Oppenheimer,
“Instead of having all inquiries go into a general queue for live chat agents, AI-based classification can route each issue to the appropriate bot or agent that is best able to assist with the issue as quickly as possible.”
11. Make Self-Service a Priority
One of the easiest ways to drastically cut down on support tickets is to promote the trend of self-service among customers. This involves solving issues by referring people to useful articles in your knowledge base as well as guiding them to automatic responses offered by your powerful chatbot agent.
Support studies have revealed that various businesses have reduced their response times from 17 hours to approximately 2 hours by focusing on and investing in self-service support and the use of automated tools.
The results of this study indicated that:
“We've seen an enormous 56% decrease in general support tickets, as customers use the community to self-serve. This means we’ve managed to create more time for the more complex tickets and bring our response and resolution times down significantly.”
12. Create Processes and Responses for Common Customer Problems
To analyze the performance of customer support tools, it is important to note how many tickets the system can handle in one day. This technique can also help in estimating the average response time.
A recent survey found that almost 40% of customer support agents were only able to handle a maximum of 10 tickets per day. The reason for such a surprisingly low performance was related to the difficulty of the customer support tickets.
This problem can be solved by recording and noting answers to difficult questions for later use. This will also make it possible for representatives to stop retyping the same answer to the same question again and again.
Want to know more about the best customer support tool that can drastically reduce response rates?
Helpy is one of the most secure and in-demand support systems that can help solve individual customer support issues.
Helpy supports regular and substantive interaction between company’s representatives and customers.
With the prevalence of insecure support systems with low response times, the demand for a system like Helpy is increasing day by day. Helpy provides an individualized online learning solution through a 24/7 support system. Replying through the Helpy interface or by email delivers the quickest response possible to the original requester.
Here's how replying through the Helpy interface reduces response time:
- Tracks tickets from new to resolved stages through a responsive, modern interface. The most modern technology is utilized to increase responsiveness and convenience.
- One-click conversion of ticket responses to knowledge base articles. Helpy saves time by preventing representatives from opening difficult tickets when there are alternative solutions available.
- Email notifications alert you or your agents to new messages. In this way, the fastest communication can occur from both sides.
- Access common replies that allow you to quickly respond to common issues. Therefore, there is no need to open tickets for similar problems that constantly occur.
If you want to know more, and especially about Helpy's chat options, Click Here!