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Blog - January 24, 2019

Is 24-7 customer support necessary for your company?

Providing 24/7 customer service is becoming increasingly popular among customer-oriented businesses. An increasing number of consumers expect they can call any time of day or night in case of questions. But it is quite an investment to provide 24/7 support. How do you find out if it’s necessary for your company and if your company is ready for it?

24-7-customer-support

A few things you need to consider

There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself to find out whether it could be worthwhile to provide 24/7 customer support. And to find out whether your company is ready for it:

  • What time of day do you get most of your calls? Check your statistics to see how many calls you are missing outside your current support hours. For example, our My Sound of Data Portal can provide customized reports based on all available call data. Or it can export this data to your BI platform so you can process the data in any way you like.
  • Check your tickets to find out whether people complain about your opening hours
  • How complicated are your callers’ questions? If they are relatively simple, you could prevent a lot of these calls by providing better and easier-to-find information in an FAQ- or Help section on your website
  • What’s the standard in your type of business? Are your opening hours like other companies in your industry? Also, have a look at the companies you look up to and maybe aspire to become
  • What kind of service do you provide outside opening hours? Just your website and social media or can customers leave a message to be called back the next day?
  • In what phase is your company? Are you just starting up, growing fast, or reached a stable level of maturity? Setting up 24/7 quality customer support takes time. So you need to make sure you don’t take up too much at once. It’s better to provide quality support for a limited number of hours than provide bad support during extended opening hours

What’s the outcome?

Looking at your answers, you will better understand whether it’s necessary and likely worthwhile to provide 24/7 support. And equally important, whether your company is ready for it.

Depending on the outcome of your findings, it might not be necessary to cover the whole 24 hours. Maybe you can already significantly increase customer satisfaction and response times by expanding from regular office hours to including (part of) the evening and weekends. This will give people more opportunities to call you outside of their working hours without having to go all the way.

Also, you can think of using a call-back option for calls outside opening hours. This is far less disappointing for callers than hearing your closed message. If you have contact centers in different time zones, follow-the-sun routing may be an option as well.

Remember that you can’t please everyone anyway and even small improvements can lead to great results.