How to Improve Resolution Time by Focusing on User Intent
Resolution time is a key metric that often serves as the dividing line between successful and unsuccessful mobile app customer service and problem resolution tactics. Long resolution times are inefficient and also indicate more serious process or development issues; even worse, they can drastically ramp up customer frustration and reduce overall customer enjoyment.
Shorter resolution times, especially if the issue is completely resolved, are good for productivity, efficiency, and customer experience metrics. Monitoring your Time to Resolution (TTR) metrics is the first step to improving them.
Monitoring your TTR helps you create the best experience for your users by optimizing resolution pathways and improving internal processes — both automated and manual.
Knowing your metrics is the first step to improving them, and having an accurate understanding of user intent lays the foundation for that improvement. Keep reading to see how gaining insight into user intent can help you and your team manage the customer service process and the entire support lifecycle.
Why Resolution Time Matters
Customer support is an essential element in revenue operations because the quality of your customers’ experience plays a large role in their renewal rates, in-app purchases, and referrals. When customers need to reach your customer support team to address a problem, they are already likely to be frustrated, in a time crunch, and impatient. If you can improve already negative experiences by minimizing time demands and delays, your organization is much more likely to retain the customer. Take a deeper look at what resolution time is and how it impacts both app users and internal support team members.
What Is Resolution Time?
Resolution time, or Time to Resolution (TTR), is the time it takes customer support teams to resolve support tickets. The clock starts as soon as a support ticket has been opened, which can happen through manual activation when a service representative answers a call or automatically as soon as a customer reaches out through a chatbot or email. Companies can measure the average resolution time to gain general insight into the efficiency of their customer support processes or evaluate the average resolution time across different issues, users, and devices.
App Users
App users have short attention spans and can quickly become impatient when faced with delays, errors, or any other bump in their usage of an app. This transfers readily to their attention span and patience when it comes to having issues resolved. Customers may temporarily abandon an app if there’s an issue, and they’ll often lose interest in the ensuing gap between opening a ticket and having the problem resolved. Too many issues or too long of a wait time can even lead to users removing your app from their device altogether.
Internal Support
Long resolution times are just as discouraging to your internal support staff. Long resolution times often indicate that the resolution processes themselves are highly manual, incomplete, and unpleasant. As a result, employees have to handle more work, and this can lead to increasingly stressed and negative communications. Even worse, your team can suffer from burnout and high turnover which further impacts your organization.
What Is User Intent in Customer Service?
User intent is a classification of the reasons why customers reach out to customer service teams for support. Some basic categories of user intent could include:
- Setting up their initial account and services
- Resolving a one-time bug or interaction to their user experience
- Addressing an error in billing, account information, or stored information
Taking the time to build resources and predictive support measures based on user intent can help your organization automate a lot of the work that goes into resolving issues and ensuring the fastest possible response to customer queries.
Intent-based customer support strategies give your customers better access to self-serve support and resources so they can quickly make changes themselves, learn more about a complex function of your platform, or even give more nuanced insight for customer service representatives. Intent-based structures can also route queries that need manual assistance to the teams or individual employees most able to provide fast assistance through expedited calls.
Gauging user intent can make the customer’s experience more enjoyable because not only are you streamlining resolution, but you’re removing a lot of stumbling blocks and extra information users don’t need to access to resolve specific issues. The result is a faster, less overwhelming, and more convenient experience that removes the burden of lightning-fast responses from your team.
User Intent and the Entire Support Lifecycle
Accurately gauging user intent is directly useful because it reduces resolution time and helps relieve bottlenecks and delays in your existing customer support processes. But well-designed systems built around user intent do more than start the interaction off on the right foot — they can change the entire nature of the customer support lifecycle.
Customers can reach out and receive self-help resources that let them solve the problem on their own schedule and through their preferred device or channels. That control can immediately make the experience more positive.
On the back-end, automated customer support and the introduction of self-serve resources helps your customer service representatives focus on improving systems, creating new resources, and addressing complex problems that still require human intervention. This further reduces resolution times, even for complicated queries that would previously be delayed across multiple hours or days. Our Smart Intents solution can help you gain new insights and provide faster solutions for in-app support queries and problems.
Optimize the Customer Support Process Through New Insights and Improved Processes With Helpshift
Proactively creating customer support resources and improving workflows to automate as much as possible creates a strong foundation for improving both user and employee experiences. Investing in the right solutions and building intuitive support solutions directly into your app can cut through downward spirals of customer and employee churn.At Helpshift, we’re here to help organizations strengthen their in-app help and self-service resources. Contact us today to learn more and start decreasing resolution time.
