How to Deliver Better Customer Service, Faster

It’s fair to say we do not live in an era known for its patience.

People these days are used to having everything they need at the tips of their fingers and having to wait for too long to access or experience anything can lead to them walking away entirely.

Gone are the days when we’d wait weeks between episodes of our favorite shows, now Netflix et al serves up entire seasons for us to binge over the weekend. The morning paper has been replaced with a constantly updating real-time news cycle which delivers the latest events in the moment. And social media has led to a situation when a trend dominates feeds for a matter of hours before our fickle attention spans move onto something else.

The same is also true for customer service. Your insurance customers need to get their issues resolves quickly and effectively and will look elsewhere for alternatives if you are unable to provide a satisfactory experience in record time.

Self-Service

One area where many companies need to improve when it comes to speeding up their customer service experience is by offering expanded and/or improved self-service options.

28% of customers say their most frustrating issue when interacting with a brand is when simple information is hard to find, and they have to waste their time calling in to find out what they need to know. That’s not all – nearly two thirds of customers [69%] have gone on the record that their first port of call when experiencing a problem is to try and resolve it themselves. However, less than a third of companies even offer self-service as an option.

Knowledge bases are a very inexpensive and simple way to empower customers to access the information they need in a heartbeat. 66% of customer service representatives already use knowledge bases to address queries so, simply by making that information easily searchable and accessible by customers, you can expand your self-service capabilities significantly for almost no extra expense.

Simple tasks such as changing address, vehicle, marital status, etc. should all be available as self-service options in 2022 and those brands which are failing to offer these extremely basic level features are going to find it increasingly difficult to compete in a world which prioritizes speed and customer experience.

Better Call Management

We already discussed how to strike the right balance between human and chatbot based customer service in our previous article, so we won’t repeat those points here. However, if you’re yet to read that piece, we recommend you do so and consider its points alongside this one.

When people do need to call in to your contact center effective queue management will make sure you accelerate the process by reducing wait times and making sure they get through to the right person first time.

• Use skill routing to distribute calls to the appropriate department. Because each department specializes in a task, they handle it more efficiently which leads to lower handle times and higher agent availability.
• Accurately project call and chat volumes based on historical data. Analyze call/chat volumes and peak load times so that you can plan shift schedules and assign staff accordingly.
• Agent training plays a key role in helping agents to respond faster, communicate efficiently, and wrap calls/chats faster. Investing in regular training will keep your team working at an optimum pace and create shorter queues.

And, for the love of all that is holy, offer automated call-backs as an option. Honestly, this is such an easy win and can be installed with extraordinarily little fuss or cost. The difference between companies who offer an automated call-back during busy periods when wait times are at a peak and those which don’t is glaring and anyone who has experienced both will confirm how much it speeds up the customer service process and reduces call wait times overall.

"Offering automatic call-backs is just one more way businesses’ can acknowledge the value of their customers’ time," writes Ozonetel. "What a customer finds most frustrating about being made to wait in a call queue is the disrespect for their time. If you cannot answer a customer’s call or chat within 10 seconds or less, you can offer to call back. You can use automated call-backs to speak to customers who may have abandoned your call queue too."

Final Thoughts

Accelerating your customer service process is a matter of communicating to your customers that you respect their time and are willing to offer solution which will speed up the time they spend on the phone. The digital solutions suggested above are all low-cost and common-sense methods of achieving this.

Accelerating the customer service process is certain to be part of the conversation at Digital Insurance Connect 2022, being held in October at the Hyatt Regency Austin, TX.

Download the agenda today for more information and insights.