It’s important to remember that your customers are your main source of income, and this is essential to the long-term survival of your business. Meeting your customers’ requirements is the key to your company’s future. Responding quickly to your customers makes them feel important. If your customers are important to you, then make sure you respond quickly!
It’s very important to respond quickly to potential customers, otherwise they’ll move on to the next supplier on Google. If your company is able to provide fast answers, the potential customer won’t take the chance with the competitor, and you’ll avoid losing new potential customers. Are you quick to respond to your customers?
A study by Super Office shows that :
- Nearly half of customers (46%) expect companies to respond within 4 hours.
- 12% expect a response in 15 minutes or less.
- 90% of customers consider an instant response to be crucial or very important when they need customer service assistance. Of these, 60% consider an instant response to mean a reply in 10 minutes or less.
Knowing the average response time (ART) you offer your customers is key to determining your ability to meet these consumer demands.
Once you know this measure, you’ll be able to understand your company’s effectiveness in responding quickly to its customers. You’ll then be able to gradually improve and increase customer satisfaction to be more successful and stand out from your competitors.
How do you calculate your ART or average response time?
First, focus on obtaining an average response time for all your contacts, whether customers or not.
AVG = average
SUM = sum
This means knowing the exact date and time of all missed calls and returned calls for each one.
Average time for returned calls = AVG(SUM(Returned call – Missed call))
A= Returned call = 12-19-2023:14:00
B= Missed call = 18-12-2023:10:00
B – A = Call return delay = 28 hours (non-business hours).
B – A = Call return time = 4 hours (business hours).
B – A = Call return time = 28 hours (non-business hours).
B – A = Call return delay = 5h (working hours according to opening hours).
Then do the same for all calls in the desired period. It is possible to calculate for each communication medium.
- Average return time for answering machine messages = AVG(SUM(Returned call – Answering machine message ))
- Average delay e-mail returns = AVG(SUM(e-mail answered – e-mail received))
- Average time text messages returned = AVG(SUM(text message answered – text message received))
IMPORTANT: Each communication has a specific date and time.
Finally, it is possible to know the average return time for all our communication media :
Average return time for all channels = AVG(SUM(Unanswered communications – Answered communications))
This can then be calculated for both business hours and total hours to assess your speed of response to customers. Finally, it’s worth filtering for contacts (not customers), new customers and existing customers to optimize your response efficiency.
All these calculations are difficult to make and maintain if you don’t have customer communication software. Discover the Fresk dashboard that calculates all this for you at every moment.
