As your business grows, it’s important for you to make a list of priorities to help direct the growth of the company. This often leads to a decision regarding the customer service hours you will be offering your clientele.
Customer support functions as a core part of any e-commerce business. As such, it needs to be approached and managed diligently and with attention to the customer experience. So why should you care about offering support outside of normal working hours?
1. It helps to set yourself apart from the competition
In order to be successful in business, you need to make your company attractive to customers. One major way to achieve this is by providing excellent customer service that meets or exceeds the customer’s expectations.
Offering support outside of the normal business hours of your company or over the weekends shows your customers that you are willing to go the extra mile for their needs. Remember, there are no traffic jams along the extra mile, so the further you're willing to go the less competition you will have to deal with!
2. It offers consistent service to your customers, no matter which time zone they are in
Customers come in all shapes and sizes across different time zones. Customer support is never just restricted to business hours of nine-five in whatever city your company has its operation.
As you go from the regional to the national stage or even to the global stage, you will encounter more customers with different time zones. It is at that point when it becomes crucial to have support at all times of the day and night, so you can offer consistent service to your entire customer base.
3. You'll have to deal with less workload at the beginning of weekdays or Mondays
It is a well-known fact in customer service operations, mornings, and especially the ones on Monday, tend to be hectic due to the amount of work that needs to be taken care of due to the accumulation of weekend or after hours requests from your customers.
This tends to cause faster than usual burnouts from personnel having to deal with such a heavy workload of all pending matters, in addition to all the customers that require live service at the same time. If attrition is a problem you're constantly having to deal with, look at this as a likely possible cause.
4. Customer service expectations are incredibly high right now
The COVID 19 pandemic has caused the average customer to expect more from businesses. Crazy sleeping patterns due to lockdowns have changed the way a lot of us go about our lives, no longer constrained to the usual 11 pm to 6 am sleeping cycle, give or take.
Because of this, when customers look for a product or service, they are now evaluating whether the company can deliver exceptional support through excellent communication skills and enhanced service, regardless of what time it is or where they happen to be located.
5. But isn't a chatbot a good way to solve this problem?
They're a great start but not enough. At the risk of sounding self-serving, chatbots are still not the answer to replace humans in customer service. Don't get me wrong, they can be a great tool to automate and assist with some of your support needs, such as filtering out very simple questions that don't require a high degree of reasoning, but they have shown time and again that they are not ready to completely take over.
This problem becomes blatantly obvious when your customer is coming into the conversation with a high degree of frustration. In these types of situations, chatbots are not programmed to handle customers in a way that will diffuse the situation and make them happy again. They will instead continue trying to offer a solution to the problem even if it's not what the customer is asking for.
Is your business ready to take that next step?
We know because we live it every day, meeting your customer's expectations is getting increasingly hard, but if you are looking for a partner that can help you transition into this type of support, look no further. We have decades of combined experience and knowledge to help your business succeed in this field.
If you're ready to take your operation to the next level, contact us today! We would be happy to discuss our services with you and see how we can help you improve your customer's experience.