Response Time: Why It’s Important and How It Affects Your Sales

Why is response time important? It isn't difficult to understand how it impacts business and customer relationships. You just need to imagine, how you feel when you send a message to a company and they take to long to answer. It isn't a pleasant experience, is it?

Customer service response time is one of the most important factors in determining customer satisfaction. It impacts how your potential customers view your brand, and can determine if they’ll purchase your product.

What Is Response Time?#

Response time can be defined as how long your company takes to answer someone that contacted you, that send an email or a direct message on your social media pages, for insance.

The faster the response time is the more chances to reach opportunities you have. While it's clearly rude to ignore someone who enters you physical store and ask for information, in the online world there are still companies that fail to understand that not anwswering online messages is also damaging to your credibility.

Ignoring messages or taking to long to answer them is unacceptable if you are looking to build trust, develop a good relationship with your target audience, and turn leads into customers, .

Why Is Response Time Important?#

Response time is important because it has a direct impact on your business results. An average short response time can help you close more sales, and increase profit. A survey by Forrester shows that:

• 73% of customers claim that valuing their time is one of their most important customer service values.
• The same research points out that at least 53% of consumers tend to give up on a purchase if they can't find quick answers to their questions.
• When browsing between different stores, 78% of consumers will buy from the first company that answers their questions quickly and accurately, often putting product or service prices in second place.

Remember that online shoppers are ready to compare and switch which retailers they use based on response time, and receiving satisfactory customer support. Considering these points, it's visible that quick response times improve cart abandonment rates and boost customer retention.

Response Time and Customer Service#

It’s important to consider that customer service response time, as well as customer expectations, are directly related to the availability of communication channels that you have.

In a brick-and-mortar store, visitors can quickly find a salesperson and receive assistance immediately. However, in the case of online stores, we need to get more creative. Many online stores still rely on using communications channels where the response time may take longer, such as email, telephone calls, and social media messages.

The truth is, these channels aren't enough e anymore. According to a survey of 1,000 companies conducted by Super Office, the average response time for social media customer service options is 10 hours. For email, the average response rate is as high as 17 hours.

Visual representation of the average response time from SuperOffice.com:

You may be thinking that this chart has something missing. What about phone customer service? One of the main reasons why phone customer service comes in last place regarding customer satisfaction is because of how fast they solve their problems. Being put on hold, and being re-directed multiple times can be very frustrating for customers.

In fact, response time is the main reason why live chat reaches satisfaction rates are as high as 73%, as indicated by 79% of survey respondents in a study made by Invesp.

Companies that look to provide a seamless, memorable customer experience use channels that allow them to provide quick response times, (live chats) - many of which also help to monitor response time.

Live Chat Is the Way to Go#

When talking about response time in the digital environment, we can't stress enough how live chat stands out due to quick response time rates. On average, the time it takes for a customer to receive an answer via live chat is two minutes and forty seconds.

Live chat is one of the few online service channels where visitors can quickly identify if customer service representatives are "online" and ready to start a real-time customer service session with them.

After you install a chat button from JivoChat, a live chat-based business messenger, you can use Smart Triggers to proactively let your customers know that you’re online and ready to help them when they need it.

Unlike email or phone, the best chat tools come with features designed exclusively to speed up response time even further. For example:

• Canned answers: Allows you to send entire sentences through shortcuts set by agents;
• Message Prediction: Lets you see what customers are typing before they send the message, allowing your team to prepare a response immediately;
• File and link transfer: You can send your customers quotes, product page links, and more.

Optimize Your Response Time With JivoChat#

In today's competitive ecommerce marketplace, it’s no longer acceptable to keep your customers waiting. That's why response time is so important.

Using an omnichannel service platform is one of the best ways to streamline your processes, boost staff efficiency, and ensure you’re ready to provide great customer support. Check out how JivoChat can help you achieve that.

JivoChat is a customer service solution that offers live chat, email, callback, and lets you monitor response time. It also offers integrations with other messenger applications such as Facebook Messenger. Install it for free on your website and find out how quick response times can help you drive sales.