MBA1077 How to Have a Faster Support Response Time + Free Ride Friday!

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What's up everybody? Today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away Easy course. You can check it out at EasyCourse co. It's a $500 course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. But we're giving it away for free on Fridays. Just leave us on itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that easy. It's our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred dollar NBA show because your business needs you to be better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to have faster support response time. Your customer support. The service you give your customers can make or break your company. We live in the right now age. No one wants to wait for anything, especially when they're paying you Money. So in today's episode, we're going to discuss some strategies to speed up the response time. How quickly you get to your customers. When it comes to your support, it doesn't matter if it's chat or email. You want to make sure that people know that you have their back. And when you can win them over with great support, it can go a long way and help you keep your customers happy and keep them paying. We tried the strategies I'll be sharing with you today, and they work. I'm not going to be sharing with you the strategies that didn't work. Some of these are very small tweaks that make a big difference. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, how do you speed up? How do you make your support response time faster? How do you make sure you can get back to your customers as quickly as possible? Well, the first thing is you have to set a goal. What kind of response time do you want to have for your company, for your business? You got to take a look at your product and your service, see what you're actually offering. Let's say, for example, you're a software company that builds websites. Your response time has to be super fast because websites are super critical. It's where people do business. If somebody's website's down, they want it up now. So you want a response time that's within under a minute. We're talking about seconds here, people. You have a little bit more leeway if it's not as critical like E commerce, but you still want to speed it up. You want to make sure that they're not waiting too long to speak to somebody, whether it's via chat or email. So have a goal in mind. So, for example, with Webinar Ninja, when we started, we had a goal for a response time of two minutes, no more than two minutes. They have to have a response. Now you might be thinking, wow, that's pretty fast response time. Yes, but we've hit that target and we want to get better. We want to get within 30 seconds. But how am I going to hit that target? I can't just magically hit a target without changing what I'm doing. So the first strategy is pretty obvious in terms of speeding up your response time, and that's getting more support agents. If you're the only one doing support right now, then you definitely need to get somebody else to do that and maybe start building out a team. This is especially important if you're offering 24. 7 live support now. It depends on how many users, customers are reaching out to you and it depends on your product. But for us with software, we found that for every 2,000 users, you need an agent. So if you have 10,000 users, you should have five agents. Now, that's generous, but it's better for you to have a faster response time than have people waiting. So just take a look at how many people are actually answering tickets, answering emails, answering chat. Number two, having a great tool for customer support can really, really help you out and make things faster. There are companies that have built specific software for this job. When you're first getting started and having just an email address like supportourcompany.com that's totally fine. But as you're growing, you're going to have to start moving on to a software that is catered to, helping you speed up your response time. Now, there are two platforms that we recommend. Number one is Zendesk. The other one is Intercom. We use Intercom for webinar Ninja. We absolutely love Intercom. It's not the perfect platform ever, but. But every application, every software has its flaws. No one's perfect, but its strengths are really, really strong. So Intercom does both chat and email messaging. It's sort of like WhatsApp or Messenger for your website. So if there's an agent that's on right now, then it's just a quick back and forth. But if no one's available, the customer's message will be sent to the general inbox and when the next agent's available, they'll pick it up. Very similar to somebody sending you a text message, except they're sending it via your website and it's going to this software called Intercom, where you have your own interface and your own queue of emails or messages from customers or potential customers. Now, the great thing about using something like Zendesk or Intercom is that there's tools inside that help your agents answer tickets faster. One of them is called canned responses. So you're going to get a lot of common questions. What's your refund policy? Do you accept American Express? Is it compatible with this? These are very common, common tickets you're going to get. And once you answer a ticket, you can make it a canned response. This is basically saving the response so you can use it for a future ticket or future email or message later. Now, obviously you're going to have to edit that response, so it's catered to that customer, but it's going to save you a whole lot of time because all the detailed instructions are going to be already written out. Again, you want to emphasize that your team customizes it and makes it personal to that customer. Another thing that's really good about Intercom is that you can respond to the customer quickly and you don't have to answer everything at once. So say, for example, the email say, hey, I need some help with X. The agent could be working on another ticket, but it will see this ticket come up and it could quickly just ping and say, hey, I'm Mark, I'll be helping you out. How can I help you? Let me know what the issue is so they can quickly respond. So they can know that hey, there's somebody here to help you. And that response time is quick. It's very hard to do this over email to manage several conversations at once. Now I highly recommend offering both chat and email so people can email us if they have a question like supportebinar ninja. Com, they could just do that off their email app and we'll get back to them via, you know, Intercom, via our software. But having chat is also great because you can quickly answer questions, especially those who are not customers yet. They might have questions on the website on a certain page and you can see in Intercom which page they're actually on. Let's say they're on the pricing page and they have a question about the different plans. Chat is brilliant with that and it allows people to get quick answers. Another great thing about using something like Intercom is that it sets up expectations. You could send Intercom the average response time. How quickly do you normally respond to tickets, respond to messages? So say, for example, I'm a customer, I'm on your website, I see your little intercom bubble on the bottom. I click it and it says Company X usually responds within two minutes. I know that if I send a message that I have to wait at least two minutes to get a response. It sets up my expectations. So it's not like, hello, is anybody here? Or you could set it, say, nobody's around today, they'll be back at 8am tomorrow. So they know that they'll get an answer via email the next day. So having that feature really is great because it sets expectations and their perception of your response time is well calibrated. All right, what else can you do? Well, I'm a big believer that self education, self serve service is a fantastic way to answer questions quickly. So create as many tutorials as you can. They could be written, they could have infographics, they can have videos. But create as Many tutorials as you can in your knowledge base so your customers can find the answer themselves. Now, with tools like Zendesk and Intercom, when they ask a question, they have machine learning that suggests tutorials that you have in the system. So say, for example, I'll say, hey, customer support, how do I create my first webinar? The system will automatically recognize those words and say, hey, this tutorial might be helpful. Quick Start Guide. This is a great guide to help you get started. So while they're waiting for the next agent, they can click on that tutorial and they might be good. They might be like, oh, this is exactly what I'm looking for. And they'll just say I'm good, thanks for the tutorial. So your response time in that instance is a second because hey, the automatic tutorial that they were given answered their question. I know. Also, in Intercom they suggest tutorials that you have in your system as an agent when you're answering tickets. So it will say, hey, you want to insert this tutorial? It sounds like you may want to use this tutorial in your response. Very, very smart. You can also preempt questions before they even ask them. So in Intercom you can kind of send a message on a page, kind of guessing what what they're probably going to ask. So say for example, you're on the pricing page. Intercom can send a message to the person on that page and say, hey, do you have questions about pricing? Check out this guide on which plan to choose. So it's like you're initiating the conversation and allowing them not to even send a message in the first place, making your response time not needed. So use technology to your advantage. Now, if you're not using a tool like Intercom for some reason, you should definitely have an autoresponder when people send emails to your support email, just an automatic email that says, hey, we got your message, it's been received and we will get back to you in X amount of time again, setting expectations as well as just acknowledging the fact that we got it. Some people just get nervous like hey, did they get my email? Am I in the queue? Should I expect a response? All that kind of stuff. That confirmation just kind of puts them at ease a little bit.

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I got one more strategy I want to share with you when it comes to speeding up, making your response time faster for your customer support. And that's scheduling. Take a look at the hours your agents work and take a look at where the most volume you get. Where do you get the most requests? Email, Sickest chat? Maybe in certain hours you need two agents during those shifts and other hours, downtime hours, hours that are not that busy, one is enough. Some of us, we just put two people on the same shift no matter what. No, take a look at your volume, see where you need the most support. Now this is going to depend on many factors. Where most your customers are, time zones, all that kind of stuff. But it's easy to find out through something like Zendesk or Intercom where they'll tell you the peak hours, where you're getting the most traffic, the most tickets, the most support requests. Make sure you got backup. Make sure you have the right personnel at the right time or should the right number of personnel. And just another quick tip, as you're growing your team and hiring new agents, make sure you use a buddy system. This is something that we've been doing and it's really, really cool. When we get a new customer service agent on board, we buddy them up with somebody who's been around the block, that's been around with our company for a while and they basically are their go to person to ask any questions, to orient them and we try to put them together in the same shift. In the beginning this is great because when you're a new hire, you don't typically want to ask your manager every single question you have. It might be a little bit embarrassing, maybe you feel like I'm asking too many questions, but a colleague, totally fine. And as long as it's official, like hey, this is your buddy, you can ask this person as many questions as you like. They're not Going to feel embarrassed, like, okay, this is what I'm supposed to do. So that's a little side tip outside of today's topic. All right, thank you so much for listening. Today's lesson's over, but today's episode's not because it's free ride Friday. I got to announce who won this week's free ride. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw every Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Junior$epo. Junior$epo is all the way from France. Junior says smart content, five stars. This is a great podcast. I listen to it every morning during breakfast and the content they give is strong and real.

Thanks.

Well, thanks, Junior Dollar Sign EPO. That's her handle on iTunes. Thanks for representing the $100 bae in France. You are a free ride Friday winner. You won a lifetime membership to EasyCourse over at EasyCourse Co, a $500 value. Our course on how to build your own online course. We're doing this every Friday, so if you want to win, just leave us an itinerary rating and review. Your mission, Junior, is to email me at omar100-mba net so I can hook you up with a free ride. All right, thank you so much for listening, everybody. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the best investments we've made in our business is improving our customer support team. It's become the hallmark of our business and is become the reason why people love our business. They love the product, but they stay for the service. They feel like our team is great. When I go to conferences, I get stopped and people say, hey, can you please thank Anna for me? Can you thank C.J. for me? Can you thank Fred for me? These are the people that work on our team on customer support. They say they treat me like royalty when I email them, when I message them. You have a fantastic team and it makes me feel so proud and so happy that that we have these people, but also reminds me how important they are to the success of our company and how we got to keep on improving and keep going strong on customer support. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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