How long does it take you to respond to a customer or potential customer when they reach out to your business? Recent studies have shown that consumers expect to receive responses a lot more quickly than most businesses actually provide. For example, 42% of consumers expect a response on social media within an hour, and 41% of consumers expect an email response within six hours.
Sit back and think about how long it takes your business to get back to online or call inquiries current and potential customers are putting in. Are you getting back to them within 1 to 6 business hours? (Although social media has created a sort of "always on," 24/7 customer service aspect rather than only during the typical 9 to 5.)
Your business's response time could be standing in the way of new customers and closing sales. People are submitting your contact form while they're in purchase mode, and they're ready to buy or learn more about your business then. If you get back in touch with them three days later, they might not be as ready to buy, or worse, they may have already gone with your competition who got in touch with them faster.
So let's talk about your business's response time.
What is your response time?
First things first, you need to know what your response time actually is before you'll know if you need to make any internal changes. After all, if your sales team is going above and beyond, getting back in touch with customer inquiries within a few hours, congratulations! But studies show that more than half of B2B companies aren't following up with customer inquiries at all, so some work needs to be done,
So how you can find out what your response time is.
There are tools available, like Drift, that assist in creating a chat widget directly on your website to have conversations with website visitors and take the process a step further than scheduling calls and meetings. They have an option called Get My Response Time that allows you to figure out your business's response time.
Drift actually states that the ideal response time is within five minutes, and if you respond within an hour, your business is seven times more likely to close the sale.
Could you imagine having seven times more customers?
What causes a poor response rate?
There are a lot of factors that go into low response rates. The biggest one is the fact that not a lot of businesses have a strategy put into place for responding to customer inquiries within an hour to six hours tops. Within five minutes would be even better.
A few other factors:
- Many sales teams retrieve info from their CRM once or twice a day, instead of as the inquiries come in. This needs to change. Your business needs some type of automation in place that sends emails to your sales team as these form submissions, etc., come in, so they're not missing any opportunities throughout the day.
- You've done too much separating of your sales team. When you have different teams or sales people for different regions, sometimes inquiries can get lost in the mix. Are these inquiries being sent to the right place? Are your teams ignoring inquiries from other departments or divisions? Creating separations like this is more business-centric than prospect-centric, and can actually cause more inquiries to be looked over and never answered.
- Your sales team is too focused on lead generation. Of course, you absolutely want your sales team to be focused on generating new leads and potential customers. But you don't want them to be so focused on lead gen that they overlook actual inbound leads, form submissions, email inquiries, and more.
How can you improve your response time?
Improving your response rate is incredibly important within your business. It's going to help you and/or your sales and marketing team to close more sales and in turn grow your business. So why wouldn't you want to create a strategy that is going to help improve this?
1. Create a process for receiving inquiries in real time.
Your sales team should be receiving inquiries as they come in, rather than logging onto a CRM or their email account once or twice a day to check for contact form submissions. Filling out a contact form confirms that the user is at least interested. You don't want a long delay in between the point when your customer is ready to buy and the actual contact. The sooner you get in touch with someone who is already in the purchasing mindset, the more likely you are to actually make a sale.
If you need to, designate a member of your sales team to monitor for emails, form submissions, customer service requests, phone calls, and social media inquiries about sales. They'll then delegate each one out to members of the sales team to immediately follow up with and try to make a sale.
2. Add a live chat to your website.
One great way to chat with customers in real time is by adding a direct messaging service onto your website. This keeps you constantly available to answer any questions any potential customer or website visitor may have. Again, designate someone on your sales team who is able to monitor for any potential chat submissions and can quickly schedule a call or meeting between the lead and someone on your sales team.
Response time is something that your business needs to pay attention to. It's not something you should brush off to the side, because it absolutely can affect your bottom line. You can and you probably will make a lot more money if you're following up with customer inquiries within just an hour or so (or, if you're an overachiever, within five minutes). Contact us to learn more about how we can help your business improve your response time and close more sales.
Written By: Doug Milnor
