Responsiveness is critical in the business world—and with good reason. A Harvard Business Review study revealed that businesses who attempted to reach leads within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify their leads than those who waited 60 minutes.
There are many tools on the market that can help businesses improve responsiveness. Business text messaging, for example, empowers teams to answer customers faster than ever before. With the help of a business SMS platform, teams can quickly assign themselves incoming messages from a transparent shared inbox, automatically route specific incoming customer messages to experts, and set up keyword-based auto-replies to ensure no customer has to wonder how long it will take to receive a response.
It’s clear that tools like business text messaging platforms help teams expedite the process of responding to customers, but why is a high level of responsiveness so important?
Read on to learn how responsiveness can help you win—and keep—customers.
Responsiveness Focuses Customers on Your Business
Let’s say you don’t respond to an incoming message right away. What could happen?
Well, it’s true that the consumer who sent the question could just wait to hear from you. They could put their phone in their pocket, go to the kitchen to make another cup of coffee, and hope your team has replied by the time they pull out their phone again.
Alternatively, this consumer could head over to your competitor’s website and see whether they have a textable number as well. If the consumer texts that number and receives an immediate reply, there’s a good chance they won’t wait for your answer to make a decision about which brand they like better.
When your team responds immediately to incoming messages, you’re ensuring that your customers’ attention is focused squarely on your business and not the competition’s. Even simply setting up an auto-reply that tells customers your team’s average response time can encourage them to sit tight and wait for your response.
In other words, responsiveness keeps your customers’ focus on you, ensuring that their attention doesn’t wander over to a competitor.
Responsiveness Appeals to the Speed Customers Crave
It turns out that customers specifically want responsiveness from your teams.
The majority (76%) of customers prioritize speed to resolution. And that’s not all—etiquette says that waiting more than 20 minutes to respond to a text can be seen as rude. In other words, customers want you to respond quickly, and if you don’t respond within 20 minutes, they’ll consider your brand rude.
These statistics can cause some stress among customer service agents. If you have a small customer service team, you may simply not be able to respond to customers that quickly. In those instances, your team can easily set up tools like during-hours and after-hours auto-replies to reassure customers that their questions will be answered as soon as possible. Teams can even set up their business text messaging platforms to respond with specific templates based on keywords in incoming texts. This automates initial replies and instantly satisfies many simple customer requests.
Responsiveness Indicates That Your Business Cares
Transparency is a big priority for consumers today. In fact, 94% of consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand that promotes complete transparency.
Replying to incoming messages and queries quickly (and honestly, of course) shows customers how willing your business is to be transparent with them. Even if your business doesn’t mean to put customers off by not answering right away, that’s how they might perceive a slow answer.
Replying to customers quickly is a great way to convince customers that you’re dedicated to transparency—showing them that you care, and, ultimately building strong, trust-based relationships.
Responsiveness Improves Product and Service Satisfaction
There’s always a chance that a customer isn’t quite using your product to the fullest and simply hasn’t had time to let you know. By proactively following up with customers to see how things are going after a purchase, you can answer any questions that will ensure your customers enjoy their products to the fullest.
If your customer has a complaint, this is a great opportunity to resolve the issue before it becomes a significant problem. Your customer will appreciate that your team cares—and hopefully, your team can come up with a solution to improve their satisfaction with your product.
If your customer likes their product or enjoyed their service, this becomes an excellent opportunity to ask for an online review.
Responsiveness Empowers Teams to Resolve More Queries
Last—but certainly not least—responsiveness empowers your teams to handle more customers.
Phone calls require employees’ undivided attention. While this is important in certain conversations, like complaint resolution or detailed product training sessions, tasks like scheduling, checking order statuses, and answering quick questions don’t require such intense focus.
In many business SMS conversations, team members wait as customers look up order numbers or confirm dates on their calendars. While team members wait to receive this information, they can quickly start another conversation on the side. As soon as the original customer resumes the chat, the team member can return, close out their query, and then return to the new customer.
Encouraging such responsiveness through multitasking ensures that teams are answering as many queries as possible, ultimately improving the overall customer experience.
Want to improve your company’s responsiveness? Try our business text messaging platform.
