How Fast Customer Service Boosts Your Brand Reputation

We all know that the customer is king, and without happy customers, you’ll soon have no business at all. But customer support isn’t some abstract concept that exists in a vacuum. Not only are customers more sophisticated than ever before, but customer support is also more intimately connected to brand reputation and trust than ever before. A single poor customer experience that goes viral on social media can do untold damage to your reputation and to brand loyalty.

So how can you make sure this doesn’t happen? How much does speed really matter when it comes to customer service — and what can you do to make sure your customer service is both fast and effective? Read on for answers.

Customer Service: Why Speed Matters

Let’s get the easy part out of the way first: Does speed matter? Yes, absolutely. But why? A few reasons.

Customers expect it. As previously mentioned, customers are growing more sophisticated and demanding all the time, and it’s up to business owners to keep up. Customers have more options than ever before, and so it often comes down to speed as a deal breaker when it comes to service.
It creates a positive first impression. Let’s face it, no one likes contacting customer service. The very phrase implies wait times, annoying hold music, tedious explanations, and more. But that’s what makes prompt, snappy customer service a huge advantage. If your customers come away happy and impressed at the speed of your customer service, they’re likely to remember that.
It prevents lost sales. Of course, the inverse is also true. Slow customer service will invariably lead to frustration, which could in turn lead to lost sales. All it takes is one bad customer experience to put someone off a company’s product or service.

Customer Service and Brand Reputation

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the link between customer service and your brand reputation.

First, customer service increases customer satisfaction — that’s a simple fact. Positive experiences encourage customers to spread the word, leave good reviews and ratings, and provide testimonials — all of which lead to increased brand reputation.

This brand loyalty can further boost your reputation because it turns satisfied customers into evangelists, who will act as ambassadors for your brand and may even convince others to get on board. Word of mouth can be a powerful marketing tool.

Good customer service also improves customer retention. This is another basic truism of customer service — happy customers come back. A satisfied customer is more likely to return and make more purchases, and in time may become closely attached to your products or services, even identifying with them personally.

Finally, good customer service builds credibility and trust, two of the most powerful tools in your arsenal when it comes to marketing. Businesses live or die on their reputation, and in an age where reviews — good or bad — can go viral in a heartbeat, reputation can turn on a dime.

Tools to Improve Response Times

Now that we’ve firmly established the link between fast customer service and brand reputation, the question remains: what can be done about it?

One powerful way to make sure your customer response times stay low is to use tools that improve those response times. One of the most powerful tools you can leverage is a ticketing system.

In case you’re not familiar, a support ticket system is a piece of software that takes in customer queries or requests, categorises them, organises them, and routes them to the proper agent. The ticket is then tracked through its entire life cycle, from creation to resolution, with accompanying metrics — including response time. If your business doesn’t have a ticketing system for handling customer requests, it may be time for that to change.

Several ticketing systems have features that, even individually, can make for faster response times, and when put together, can vastly improve those metrics. Typical features of a ticketing system include:

Live chat & AI chatbots. Live chat is a great way to connect quickly with your customers, and an AI-powered chatbot can be there even when your human agents can’t — giving customers 24/7 availability.
Auto-responders, FAQs and knowledge bases. An emerging trend in the business world is self-service, allowing customers to resolve their issues, and having an online knowledge base, FAQ, or other resources online can help them do that. As long as the relevant information is easy to find quickly, your customers will likely leave satisfied.
Brand monitoring and customer feedback. Tools such as Google Alerts, media and social listening tools, and surveys can help keep you in touch with your customers’ needs and desires.
Streamlining. It’s worth returning to the core functionality of a ticketing system and just how useful it can be when it comes to resolving customer requests fast. A ticketing system organises and prioritises tickets for faster resolution, in ways that human agents can’t do quite as well.

A ticketing system isn’t the only way to improve the speed of your customer service — training your staff extensively is another way you can bring those response times down, for example, as well as making your vectors for customer service (website, social media, etc.) accessible and informative. But a ticketing system is a great first step — it can take a massive burden off the shoulders of your human agents, giving them more time and space to excel in the ways AI and knowledge bases can’t.

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