Does Your Response Time Matter?
Imagine: you own a hair salon, a plumbing business or a law firm, or a bakery, and it’s the best in town. You can’t sign up people fast enough for haircuts and color. Your plumbers are on top of everyone’s list, and your croissants fly off the shelves every morning. But one day, your clients who are so used to the perfect service raise their eyebrows. No, your business didn’t suddenly turn bad, but it’s not as good as it used to be. There could be many reasons for this kind of a problem and it’s not necessarily what you produce. It could be an unintended consequence of your business’s growth: long response time. If it takes forever to get in touch with you to schedule an appointment or get help with a broken pipe, or to get an answer to a question at your law firm … Yes, you get the picture: your clients will move on and quickly.
For example, the Harvard Business Review released a study on the lead response time of over 2,200 U.S. companies. It found that just over half (53%) responded within 24 hours, and nearly one-quarter (23%) never responded at all.
Consumers today are anything but patient. With the current level of communications provided by the newest technology, everybody expects to receive an instant response to their inquiries. Finding a way to accomplish this might dramatically improve your clients’ satisfaction and even save your entire business from going under.
Higher Retention Rates
A report from the White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that it’s as much as seven times more costly to attract a new client than to retain one you have. By responding to your current customers as quickly as possible, you will have higher retention rates.
Better Company Reputation
Most of your company’s customer satisfaction rating is based on how you make clients feel when they need to arrange for service or resolve an issue. If they are already frustrated with you being unresponsive, there’s a good chance you won’t score very high. On the other hand, if you have somebody always standing by to attend to your callers, your company’s reputation and satisfaction scores will soar.
More Efficient Operations
Another question is, who will answer the phones? When your office staff is consistently struggling to juggle answering calls with other essential work, something will fall through the cracks. Also, your business may suffer if answering phones or responding to messages is put off for too long. Therefore, you need to make sure that your clients receive attention and your office staff has more time to run your business efficiently.
Increased Client Referrals
Nobody likes bad reviews on yelp. However, when you pay attention to your response time and client satisfaction, your happy customers will tell others about the outstanding service they received. This will boost your client referrals and allow your business to grow.
Competitive Advantage
When you make response time and customer service your priority, you will probably be doing something that most of your competitors are not. There could be many solutions to this issue and many ways to make your company’s reputation stronger. One of them would be to partner with a professional answering service.
This service will represent your business around the clock, schedule, reschedule and confirm appointments, provide information, and contact you in case of emergency. When your business delivers a quick response time to its clients, it’s showing that it cares about customers, increases satisfaction levels, boosts referrals, and improves the bottom line. Everybody wins!
Feel free to contact Answering365 to learn about how our professional call answering service can help your business. Be sure to ask for a free consultation when you call 888-588-9800. You are open 24/7.
