Customer support is an important part of any business. It’s the bridge between your customer and your company. It’s also a key factor in maintaining customer satisfaction. The time it takes for customer support to resolve an issue is a key metric that can help your business improve its overall customer satisfaction score.
Known as mean time to resolution, MTTR can be used as a benchmark for performance comparison and also helps with customer support expectations. If your MTTR is too high, you will lose customers and your business will suffer. That’s why it’s important to set clear expectations and establish common ground with your team members so they can help your company achieve shorter MTTRs.
The MTTR metric also helps you determine what areas of your business are taking up too much of your resources. If you find that certain areas are weighing down resources, then it might be worth looking into the 5 strategies we’ve documented below to help you improve your mean time to resolution.
Strategy #1: Train your employees
Employee training is one of the most important aspects of any company. It helps employees to get familiar with your company’s culture, policies and goals. It can also be used as a way to reinforce skills that are already mastered by an employee. This ensures that they’re on top of their game. In either scenario, training is a good way to identify skills gaps and help employees improve their MTTR.
Strategy #2: Be thorough to minimize back and forth
In order to limit the amount of back and forth between your support teams and customers, they should be thorough in both their qualifying questions and responses back to the customer. This will minimize the number of conversations that were resolved being reopened for additional assistance. You should educate your support team that these conversations were never technically resolved and demonstrate the level of response you expect.
Strategy #3: Invest in a knowledge base for employees
Each time a new employee joins the company, they should be given access to the knowledge base so that they can quickly learn how to do their job. A knowledge base is a collection of documents, videos, software, and other training materials that can be used to help employees learn the business. It’s a valuable resource for employees to access information about your company, its products, services, and culture.
Strategy #4: Offer self service options
Providing self service options to your customers can have an immense impact on your mean time to resolution. Customers become self-sufficient and you reduce the frequency of redundant customer inquiries. Your support teams then become free to take on more pressing and complex issues in their queue.
Strategy #5: Triage customers
Understanding what’s wrong with customers before they get to your support team can be vital to reducing your MTTR. That’s because you eliminate the need for one of your team members to ask them what the issue is. And you provide yourself an opportunity to route them to the right personnel who can help them with their problem. Investing in the right triage tools can make the world of difference.
How Guidde can help you improve your mean time to resolution (MTTR)
Whether you need to create training content, spin up a self-service portal, or develop a knowledge base from scratch, Guidde can help you quickly scale your content creation efforts.
Produce step-by-step documents and video tutorials in a matter of clicks - no training required! Add images, voiceovers, or existing video, and instantly via email, Salesforce, Slack, Zendesk, Intercom and more!
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