This is what happens when your support doesn’t respond right away

Discover why customer support response times under 15 seconds are crucial. Learn how AI agents can revolutionize your support by providing instant responses, reducing ticket volumes, and keeping customers satisfied before they get frustrated. Enhance your support experience with technology.

This is what happens when your support doesn’t respond right away
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Jul 19, 2024 11:30 AM
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Jul 19, 2024
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Is your average first response time under 1 minute?
Feeling pretty proud of yourself and your team?
I hate to break it to you… but unless they’re under 15 seconds, it doesn’t matter whether it is 59 seconds, 5 minutes or an hour.
We’ve all had it drummed into us that faster responses mean higher customer satisfaction, and it’s true, to a point.
However, most of the studies showing this are based on teams bringing response times down from days or tens of hours to single-digit hours.
Not from minutes to fewer minutes.
There is a point where the gains are marginal at best.
notion image
If you want to see what I am talking about, try this little experiment:
Go to your own live chat (or any other website) and send a message.
Then wait.
Wait for 60 seconds.
Very soon, you’ll get bored.
In reality, nobody does this, nobody waits for a minute doing nothing.
We all have far too many distractions in our lives to do nothing for a whole minute.
Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
They are at work. They have their boss breathing down their neck. They have a deadline.
And just when they need your product the most, it isn’t working, or they can’t figure out how to use it.
Science shows that when stressed, we perceive time to pass slower.
So however long that 60 seconds felt before, to them, it will feel even longer.
They get frustrated.
They leave and never see the friendly, courteous response from your agent.
Let’s play this out further.
Say they went to do something else but then came back to your chat 5 - 10 mins later, only to find that either:
  • You asked for more information
  • The question wasn’t answered
  • The agent has closed the chat due to a lack of response (likely so ‘Time To Close’ targets can be achieved)
Maybe they even respond, only to find they are waitingagainfor a response.
There are only so many times a person is willing to do this before they give up.
Now, let me be clear, this isn’t an attack on agents.
Agents have an incredibly stressful job. They deal almost exclusively with demanding people who are frustrated and want attention.
Agents can’t wait for each person to respond so they can be there immediately (without hiring crazy numbers of agents anyway).
It just doesn’t make sense.
And, this is all before we even consider the double-sided context-switching required from both parties…
Agents are constantly switching between multiple tickets while the users are switching between their day job and the issue they are having (all the while messaging their co-workers on IM).
‘People’ just aren’t the right ‘tool’ for the job, technology is.
That technology is AI.
An AI support agent will respond in seconds, to every query, 24/7, before a user can click to another tab.
An AI agent won’t answer everything, but it will reduce ticket volumes to a level that is manageable for support teams.
(they’ll also ensure that the user has tried all the ‘obvious’ solutions before reaching the human agent)
AI agents are theonlyway companies will be able to (scalably) respond to customers in a time that really makes a difference to the customer.

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Written by

Mike Heap
Mike Heap

Mike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.