When you are just not available
No matter how efficient your customer support team and system, there will always be a time when nobody is available to answer a query. What customers hate about this situation is that rarely will anyone get back to them quickly, if a resource is not available immediately.
Handling ‘off’ times
To handle such situations, if a question is held in the queue for more than 10 seconds, the smart query application will send the user a ‘busy’ message and allow the user to submit their name and email address. This information gets held back in the queue and the CSR can reply to the question as soon as possible.
In case a user asks a question after hours, a smart query based system will send the user an after-hours message and allow them to submit their name and email address.
When creating a new Q&A record, the CSR can also choose to mark the record with an expiry date and time. The application will check each day and hour and if it finds a record that has expired, it will remove it from the main database into an archive. For instance, if your company is organizing a free service camp for users in New York’s Staten Island on 20th June, 2009, questions regarding the time and venue of the camp would no longer be valid once the event is over. Your team could mark questions of this kind with an expiry date.
Being there for customers
Being there for customers does not necessarily mean simply having a 24X7 presence. It means having a system that anticipates down times and covers for them efficiently. Customers appreciate the company getting back to them as soon as possible rather than having to call in multiple times.
