7 tips of communicating with your clients and how to not lose them

We want to share our experience on how we handle feedback from our clients. Here are some of our rules helping us to get great feedback about the quality of our tech support:

1. Speed of response to a client request.
   
   The faster you respond to your client’s question the more satisfaction your client will get from working with you. Even if you use auto-replies when your client creates a ticket and inform that you will reply within 24 hours, it will be a depressing factor as the client is already potentially expected to wait for your reply in 24 hours. You have to reply within 1, maximum 2 hours. At CleanTalk we stick to the rule that 80% of all replies must be given within 1 hour since the creation of a question and since the previous client reply, moreover, we manage to get it done about 20-30 minutes faster. Such speed of replies is very motivating for clients and we get feedback that our support team is one of the fastest they have worked with.
   
   
2. Accessible and clear information.
   
   Provide your client with a clear and accessible description of how the issue should be resolved. If the client is required to perform some actions from their side then do the following:
   – describe a detailed and step-by-step order of such actions;
   – provide a screenshot, mark the needed area of the interface and what actions are needed to be done;
   – provide your client with a link to the necessary interface or guide, this way your client will not have to search for the necessary pages themselves.
   These steps are needed so the client does not have to ask you again how to do a particular action that you were asking earlier, which ultimately reduce the time it takes to resolve the issue and the number of responses per request. On average, we get 3.33 responses per request.
   
   
3. Deadlines of solving the issues must be met.
   
   If you can not solve the issue immediately and you require some help from your colleagues such as your programmer, then give a realistic date when you will respond to the client. Do not give unrealistic deadlines to avoid rescheduling. If for objective reasons you will not meet the deadline then inform the client about it and give them a new deadline. You should keep track of the deadlines and not let the issue be continually postponed because of the workload of other employees. Establish smooth cooperation between departments, there should not be any delays on any stage of the problem solving process. In our company in each department (Web Developers, Client-Side Developers, Server-Side Developers) there is an employee who is solving client issues that came from the technical support.
   
   If the question is complex and requires more time to find a solution/answer and you can not immediately give your answer in an hour, tell the client about it right away. Write how much time you’ll need for troubleshooting the question and prepare your answer. For example, “I’m sorry, it will take longer than usual to investigate your issue and I will be able to give you a detailed answer in 4 hours”.
   
   
4. Provide your support staff with all details they need.
   
   Your employees should not spend their time searching for information about the client. Analyze how the workflow of your employees is made, note the most frequent and time-consuming activities and try to automate them so that these activities would be performed with a single button.
   
   
5. Offer a bonus for your mistakes.
   
   If there was a mistake by your fault then offer your client a bonus to compensate their time. It’s a good practice for building loyalty to give some encouraging attention to your clients.
   
   
6. Prepare your reply templates for the same type of questions.
   
   Analyze your client requests. There will always be similar questions and it takes a lot of time if you have to type your similar replies quite often. It is easier to prepare the standard reply templates that can already be edited depending on the situation. Try not to make such templates look like a machine answer, edit the template in your answer for more human-like communication.
   
   
7. Make sure that the client’s question is resolved.
   
   If the client reached out to you and you gave them a solution, ask the client at the end of your reply if your instructions helped them and if their question has been resolved. It greatly reduces the time it takes to resolve the issue.

We hope, our experience that we shared will help your support team and your clients to get the most useful communication with each other. If you have any thoughts to add, please write them down in the comments.

If you want us to share more of our experience with you – let us know in the comments below and don’t forget to share if you like the post.

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