Customers’ expectations for timely interactions today are as high as ever, whether they’re still at the beginning of their buying journey or are already paying customers. While swift responses can increase satisfaction and retention, slow reply times can negatively affect your sales and support operations. 

If slow response times are something your business is currently struggling with, read on! In this article, we’ll dive into why response times are so important, what the biggest challenges to improving them are, and how to use AI to help your teams help your customers. 

Why Response Times Matter

At the beginning of the customer journey, response times are crucial to get a conversation going. And they’re getting shorter and shorter — or at least, they should be. 

According to research conducted by the Harvard Business Review, companies that reply to inbound leads within an hour have much higher chances of qualifying them. However, more recently, a different study but InsideSales suggests that, when the first contact happens over 30 minutes after a lead submits information, the chances of qualifying the lead decrease by over a tenfold, as opposed to when the lead is contacted within 5 minutes. 

What about after the lead has already converted into a paying customer? 

In that case, response times as just as important. According to research from Qualtrics and ServiceNow, 80% of customers claim to have switched brands because of poor customer experience. Poor customer service is the most cited reason for doing so. 

The definition of poor customer service isn’t universal, but having to wait too long for a reply when you’re facing an issue and are trying to solve it can hardly be seen as positive. 

How long customers are willing to wait for a reply from customer service/support depends on the channel they’re using to contact a business. An article in the Zendesk Blog offers the following benchmarks:

• Email: less than 12 hours (good), less than 4 hours (better), less than 1 hour (best)
• Social media:  less than 5 hours (good), less than 2 hours (better), less than 1 hour (best)
• Live chat: less than 1 minute (good), less than 40 seconds (better), instantly (best)

You can already see how this might present a challenge, especially when it comes to expecting instant replies when getting in touch through a live chat channel. 

Common Barriers to Swift Response Times 

Several barriers contribute to slow response times, including lack of automation, manual data entry, complex routing, inadequate training, and lack of content personalization.

Before we dive into the solutions, let’s break down the challenges at each step of the customer journey. 

Marketing & Sales

Acquiring new leads is a critical aspect of business growth. However, efficiently managing and converting those leads is often where problems start to arise. 

Marketing and sales teams can grapple with sluggish lead response times, leading to friction between them. On the one hand, marketing efforts to acquire leads can go to waste when not efficiently converted because response times are slow. On the other hand, sales teams may find themselves spending time on leads not ready for conversion because something failed at the very first step of the lead journey. 

So, what is causing this friction?

There can be a few reasons why lead response times are slow at this stage, but let’s focus on what we believe to be the main hurdles. 

Data Silos

Data silos are sets of information only specific groups or teams have access to. They happen when information is collected and stored in different places through different software, platforms, or tools. 

They can impact response times because they make accessing information more difficult. First, teams need to figure out where data is stored, then they need to gain access to it by reaching out to whoever is managing that data silo, before finally being able to use the data. This can slow down response times, because marketing and sales teams end up using their time to look for information, instead of replying to leads. 

Multiple Channels and Integrations

Using multiple marketing channels to generate and engage with leads can be beneficial to businesses, because it allows them to meet leads where they are. However, in order for it to go well, marketing and sales teams need to ensure they’re providing the same high-quality experience regardless of the channel. 

One of the biggest challenges this poses is ensuring leads get fast replies across the board. Coordinating responses across email, social media, messaging apps, and any other channel can be time-consuming. Additionally, the process may further be hindered if all those channels are not properly integrated with your sales team’s tools and software. 

High Volumes of (Unqualified) Leads

Dealing with high volumes of leads can overwhelm your sales reps and slow down response times, especially if:

Customer Support & Success

Congratulations! You have successfully converted your leads into paying customers. Now, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Right? Not necessarily.

Quick and effective replies to customer questions as just as important at this stage of the journey as they were in the beginning stages. 

As mentioned in the first section of this article, 80% of customers say they have switched businesses because of poor customer experience, with poor customer service being the lead reason for it. Additionally, they state that waiting for replies for an extended period of time is the second thing that drives the most negative experiences with a company, topped only by not having their issue solved. 

Let’s have a look at some of the main reasons why your customer teams are struggling with response times. 

High Ticket Volumes & Poor Prioritization

Similar to what happens to sales teams, large volumes of customer inquiries can overwhelm the customer support/success teams, leading to slower response times. 

In addition to that, poor prioritization of these tickets can also contribute to delayed replies. Without a clear prioritization system, you can come across common pitfalls like inconsistent criteria or overlapping categories that create confusion among your agents and negatively affect their performance and ability to get back to customers. 

Manual Handling of Repetitive Tickets

No matter what industry your business operates in, there are certain questions that will always pop up. They don’t call them frequently asked questions for nothing. 

These tickets are usually easy to solve, but the problem is, that they make up for a significant portion of customer requests. According to research conducted by DigitalGenius:

• 37% of customer service leaders say that 40% of their team’s tickets are repetitive;
• 48% say that over 30% of tickets are repetitive;
• And 80% say that 20% or more of tickets are repetitive.

Even though they’re more often than not easy to solve, the sheer volume of them might be enough to slow down your agents’ efficiency and possibly leave customers hanging who have more pressing issues to solve. 

Data Silos & Integration Challenges

That’s right — data silos come into play in customer support and support operations as well. 

The way in which they slow down response times, in this case, is because they force agents to spend a considerable amount of time tracking down the right information about customers. When customer data is siloed across different tools or systems, it can take a lot of back and forth between them to troubleshoot an issue, which increases the time it takes to get back to the customer. 

For Success teams, data silos pose a problem because they don’t allow for a clear overview of the whole customer journey. If the marketing data is stored in one platform, the sales in another one, and tickets from customer service on a third platform, it will take more time for agents to paint the whole picture about a customer and more time to get back to them when needed. 

Sometimes, the problem can become even bigger when, on top of data silos, the different systems used by all your teams aren’t properly integrated, since this can create obstacles in accessing relevant customer information.

Different teams will face different challenges that are specific to the business area, yet most of what slows teams down can be summarized into high workloads, manual and repetitive tasks, and an overall lack of efficiency. And although there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to all of the problems that slow your teams down, conversational automation and AI are a good place to start.

The Power of Conversational AI in Reducing Response Times

In other articles on this blog, we’ve already talked about how AI chatbots are masters in reducing lead response times. But for consistency’s sake, let’s go over again how they can help marketing and sales teams, and understand how they can help customer support and success teams, too. 

Conversational AI in Marketing & Sales

Conversational AI solutions can completely transform the lead generation and management process.

AI chatbots can reduce reply times in marketing and sales operations by:

• Being available 24/7: AI chatbots guarantee leads have access to assistance or information, even outside your teams’ business hours. This means that leads will no longer have to wait for your team’s workday to start to get a reply. 
• Responding in real-time: In the first section of this article, we explored how long customers are willing to wait for a reply in each channel, and the expectation for live chat is “immediately.” We know that’s not always possible, when there’s a human behind the wheel. However, AI chatbots can offer (near) immediate answers that contribute to a better experience. 
• Automating FAQs: By effectively managing routine and repetitive requests, AI chatbots will give those requests an immediate response, but they’ll also reduce wait times for leads with more complex questions by freeing up sales reps’ workloads. 
• Qualifying leads in real-time: AI chatbots can update lead scores instantly as they interact with leads. As mentioned before, sales reps often spend over half their time handling administrative and manual tasks — such as lead qualification — and, this way, same as with FAQ automation, they’ll find themselves with more time to focus on getting in touch with potential customers faster. 

In other articles on this blog, we’ve covered in-depth how AI chatbots can reduce lead reply times by acting as virtual sales assistants, but to sum it up, they can address lead questions, recommend products, and assist in their decision-making process. By integrating them into their marketing and sales strategies, businesses can expedite the sales cycle, with potential customers receiving the information they need in real-time.

Conversational AI in Customer Support & Success

Luckily, the benefits of AI-driven chatbots can be reaped beyond sales and marketing teams.  Incorporating conversational AI into your customer support and success processes can streamline operations, automate repetitive tasks, and, ultimately reduce reply times. 

Here’s how:

• Being available 24/7: AI chatbots guarantee leads have access to assistance or information, even outside your teams’ business hours. This means that leads will no longer have to wait for your team’s workday to start to get a reply. 
• Responding in real-time: In the first section of this article, we explored how long customers are willing to wait for a reply in each channel, and the expectation for live chat is “immediately.” We know that’s not always possible, when there’s a human behind the wheel. However, AI chatbots can offer (near) immediate answers that contribute to a better experience. 
• Automating FAQs: By effectively managing routine and repetitive requests, AI chatbots will give those requests an immediate response, but they’ll also reduce wait times for leads with more complex questions by freeing up sales reps’ workloads. 

If it seems like you’re getting déjà vu, you’re not entirely wrong. 

By efficiently automating certain parts of different processes, handling routine inquiries, and providing immediate interaction, AI chatbots can help tackle some of the problems marketing, sales, and customer support teams have when it comes to reply times. This helps your business deliver a superior customer experience and leads to higher satisfaction levels across the buying journey. 

The advantage is pretty straightforward. Bonus point: if the same AI solution can improve response times across the entire funnel, it means you’re able to work with one partner to implement it across multiple processes. 

Landbot as Your Conversational AI Partner

The boom we’ve been seeing in generative AI, such as ChatGPT, in recent years, has made building reliable AI chatbots easier than ever. While before, business leaders might have felt skeptical about implementing AI into their different operations, now, more and more leaders are comfortable moving in that direction. 

As a result, at Landbot, we’ve been able to launch several AI-based features and products that can help your operational teams reduce reply times, become more efficient, and drive more growth. 

Landbot’s AI-assisted bot builders that can help you improve response times include:

• AI-Powered FAQs Feature: This feature allows you to build either a stand-alone AI FAQ chatbot or integrate the AI FAQ feature inside a multi-functional chatbot. Basically, all you need to do to make it work is copy and paste your FAQs (in question-answer format or just a unified text) into the AI FAQ block and feed it into the bot. It’s a quick and easy way to deploy an assistant that will help your sales and/or customer support teams by handling repetitive questions. 
• AI Sales Assistant: The AI Sales Assistant engages with your potential customers 24/7 and can assist in closing deals. Similarly to the FAQ feature, you can also use it to quickly build and launch a standalone chatbot or integrate it into a greater conversational flow. This way, replies to leads will be virtually instantaneous.

Conclusion

In the landscape of customer interactions, meeting leads’ and customers’ expectations when it comes to response times is key to increasing conversion rates but also preventing customers from churning.

With Landbot AI, we can help our clients build AI chatbots powered by GPT technology with faster deployment times, without sacrificing their experience with our builder. And as AI continues to evolve, so we’ll keep working on products to better tackle more challenges across the customer lifecycle.