Your business needs customers to thrive. As your business grows and increases its customer base, it also needs to ensure its efficiency level can provide customers with their various needs. Slow services and long waiting times can frustrate your customers. Statistics show that 84% of customers say customer service is critical for buying decisions. This means that customers would most likely leave businesses that do not provide speedy service. So, how can you improve customer waiting time? Here are four tips you should consider.
Communicate
Many business owners underestimate the importance of communication with customers. Your business can avoid and properly manage issues by communicating. The business world is filled with unexpected system failures, delays, and many setbacks that may prevent you from meeting your customers' needs on time. However, you would do more harm than good by not communicating these unfortunate delays with your clients. By communicating with your customers about delays, you prevent "aimless" waiting and ease their frustrations.
Be transparent about expectations
The truth is, you wouldn't want to upset your customers by informing them that you cannot meet their expectations. Therefore, not being transparent or honest about it may seem like the right thing to do, but it isn't. Suppose your customer is expecting a package soon, yet you cannot meet these expectations due to various factors. In that case, it is better to inform your customer about this as clearly and honestly as possible. Doing this is an efficient way of avoiding prolonged waiting times. You can give your client a new delivery day or set new attainable expectations. This would prevent your customer from being tossed around and waiting and keep their loyalty to you.
Improve your delivery processes
It is vital to ensure that you meet your customer's delivery needs. This plays a vital role in the reputation your customer builds about your business. It helps to identify and address those underlying factors affecting your delivery performance, such as poor forecasting, delayed delivery times, and inefficient product management. While a lean supply chain can help you improve your customer waiting times, it is helpful to find a lean supply chain consulting firm to support your delivery process strategies.
Employ the right marketing language
It is common to get overly excited in an attempt to be unique among your competitors. However, you can end up spreading the wrong message, make unrealistic promises, and leave out those details that can put you beyond your competition, especially when it comes to customer waiting times. For this reason, it helps to be clear with your marketing message understanding. For example, if you can better your competitors' waiting time, put that in your marketing message yet avoid making insane promises you can't keep.
Customers would stay with a business that puts them first. For this reason, you must ensure your business has various measures in place to show your customers this. As speedy and reliable services are vital to your customers, implementing these measures is an efficient way of improving your business's customer waiting times.