How many of your customer enquiries could answer themselves?
When you think about the support enquiries you receive from customers, what makes up the majority? The likelihood is that most of them ask for information you already have easily available – updates on orders, copies of invoices, seasonal opening hours.
Actually answering these questions is simple, but each one distracts you from the task you were focused on, disrupting your productivity. And if you aren’t able to monitor your messages or phone constantly, your customers may have to wait a couple of hours for an answer, which could lose you a sale.
This month, we are looking at ways you can help your customers to help themselves. The first step in allowing customers to answer their own questions is working out which questions you are actually being asked.
The same questions on repeat
In our experience, repeat enquiries are usually simple questions that customers can’t answer themselves, either because the information is only available to staff or because it isn’t easy to find. Think of questions such as:
- ‘Is my order out for delivery?’
- ‘How can I pay my invoice?’
- ‘Do you deliver to my area?’
- ‘Can I reschedule my booking?’
In most of these cases, the fix is to make the information easier for the customer to find.
The cost to you and your customers
As mentioned above, the time it takes to answer a question is only a few minutes, but the disruption goes far beyond that. Answering just five or six questions over an afternoon can really have an impact on your ability to concentrate on your primary task. We’ve looked at this in more detail in The 5PM feeling: where SMEs lose 5-15 hours every week.
If you are fielding a lot of questions each day, those quick two-minute calls can soon add up to a couple of hours. Most small businesses don’t have the luxury of a dedicated support team to deal with these queries, so it’s your team that has to fit them in around their existing tasks.
And there is a cost to your customers too. Many people today would prefer to be able to find the information themselves straight away, rather than wait until the next morning for a reply. In some cases, they may go elsewhere as soon as they realise that the only way to find out the answer is to call you.
Finding the patterns
To help your customers help themselves, you first need to know what they actually want to know. Over the course of a week, keep a record of the enquiries you receive.
- Keep a tally. Ask every team member who answers the phone, emails or social media messages to note down each enquiry in a shared space – including what was asked and roughly how long it took to deal with.
- Group by type. At the end of the week, group the enquiries by type – such as order updates, invoices, booking changes and prices. Usually a few types dominate the list.
- Note where you found the answer. For each type, make a note of where you found the information, and who is able to see it.
- Ask whether it would be safe for the customer to see it. For some things, like order information, it would be useful and appropriate for a customer to find it themselves. For other, more sensitive things, keeping them for staff only makes more sense.
- Look for simple fixes. Many questions can be dealt with by updating your website, adding something to your FAQs or scheduling an automated email like a confirmation email.
- Keep real human support accessible. Self-service should help customers who want to sort things out themselves, without making it harder for those who’d rather talk to a member of staff.
What to do with what you find
Simple fixes are the best place to start for most small businesses. Make sure that dispatching an order, or cancelling or confirming a booking, sends an automatic email to the customer. Check that your FAQ page includes the questions that really are being frequently asked. Make sure that things like seasonal opening hours are displayed clearly on your website and on your Google Business Profile. All of these things will take pressure off your team without needing new software.
Sometimes, though, the patterns you find will expose a bigger gap. If you find yourself searching through multiple systems just to answer a single question, a customer area that brings the information together in one place your customers can see could be truly beneficial.
It’s also worth noting that not every enquiry should be made self-service. Some questions are too niche to be answered without human input, and sometimes customers just want a human voice to reassure them. Clear contact details should still be available to them.
Need a hand?
If you’d like help spotting the patterns, or you’ve found them but aren’t sure what to do next, give us a call on 01637 222001 or get in touch. We’ll take a look and tell you honestly what the logical next steps are for you – software or not. You can also book a free business process audit.