Support Team Mailbag: Reducing Turnaround Time

Ever wonder what the customer support queue for a customer support platform might look like? Welcome to the Support Team Mailbag, a blog series where you can learn what’s on our customers’ minds and get the inside scoop on how we provide support.

Today’s question: 

I was wondering if you have any best practices to help reduce turnaround time? 

Reducing turnaround time is one of the most common goals for support teams — including our own! While it can be tempting to focus on speed alone, improving response time often requires a closer look at your workflows, tools, and internal resources.

First, consider what’s currently keeping your team from meeting your ideal response time:

• Are there particular types of conversations your team is struggling with? For instance, do they take much longer to respond to technical questions, or do they get tripped up when working with specific customers?

• Are response times slipping because conversations aren’t getting noticed soon enough?

• Are you missing internal resources — knowledge base articles, saved replies, product cheat sheets, etc. — that would help your team work more effectively and efficiently?

• Are the available internal resources easy for your team to find and navigate? 

As you reflect on the questions above, here are some ideas to help get your turnaround time moving in the right direction.

Bring attention to conversations 

Take time to organize and provide clarity in the inbox. Some added structure can help your team navigate through conversations more smoothly and reduce the cognitive load that it can take to process a busy queue. 

Take quick action with workflows

Automatic workflows take speedy action on conversations, helping move them in the right direction as soon as they hit your inbox.

Use an Automatic workflow to: 

• Add tags to conversations, creating visual cues to help them stand out in your inbox. 

• Assign conversations to the user or team who is best suited to answer the question.

• Send an auto reply to customers based on what they’ve written about. For example, use a workflow to spot key phrases related to being locked out of an account or needing a new password, and then send an automatic reply with information on how to complete a password reset. 

Shine a spotlight on lingering conversations with views 

If you’re finding that conversations are getting lost in the noise of a larger “unassigned” folder, then views will help organize conversations so your team can sharpen their focus. 

The “waiting since” criteria looks for how long a conversation has been waiting for a reply. Time-based criteria like this make it easy to determine which conversations are creeping close to missing your response goals.

Here is a view that looks for conversations that have been waiting longer than 48 hours:

Your team can monitor or favorite any of your views and use them as a quick check to see which conversations to prioritize and respond to first. 

To further narrow in on specific conversations, you can filter views based on additional factors like tags, customer email address, and customer properties. 

Highlight conversations with notifications

If your team handles a variety of tasks and is not actively looking at Help Scout all day long, then setting up notifications can help them stay on top of what’s happening in your queue. Email, mobile, and/or browser notifications can be enabled to alert you when a new conversation has arrived or when a customer has replied, so your team will know when it’s time to hop back into your account. 

Our Slack integration can also notify you of what’s happening in Help Scout. For example, if you’re trying to focus on improving response time to new conversations, then you can set up the integration to post to a Slack channel anytime a new conversation is received. You can even map your users in Help Scout to their Slack account so that the integration can @mention them when a conversation requires their attention.

Build out your team resources

Provide your team with tools that will empower them to do their best work. To begin, you may want to anticipate resources that you think would be beneficial. This might be things like access to product documentation or adding a new piece of software to your tech stack.

However, what might be an even better option is having a team brainstorming session to cooperatively build out your resource list. Some options you might consider include the use of saved replies, knowledge base content, and AI.

Create a useful collection of saved replies

A handy library of saved replies will provide your team with ready-to-go responses that they can use in their replies. This can be a time saver, as they allow you to respond quickly to commonly asked questions or issues and free up time to troubleshoot more complex queries.

Here are the steps to creating useful saved replies:

• Create your saved replies. What are the most common questions you receive? Is there a consistent solution or set of troubleshooting steps for these issues that could be defined in a few saved replies? If so, add them to Help Scout.

• Make them easy to find. Next, you’ll want to make sure that it’s easy for your team to find the saved reply they need. Are your saved replies named randomly or do you use a common naming system? Coming up with a standard way to title your saved replies will help them be more accessible. 

• Make them useful and relevant. Does your team use saved replies regularly? Are there any that your team wishes they had available that aren’t in the system? How can you help your team make more regular use of saved replies? Consider these questions, and come up with a plan to ensure that your team has access to and uses saved replies in their daily work.

• Regularly assess your saved replies. Are any of your saved replies out of date or no longer relevant? Perform an audit! A member of our own support team leads a regular cleanup to assess the usefulness of our collection of saved replies. 

In the world of a SaaS company, where things are ever-changing and product launches happen often, information can become outdated pretty quickly. Doing a regular cleanup of your saved replies list makes a world of difference for the efficiency of your team.

Not only does it keep things neat and organized, but it also ensures that those using the saved replies are sending the most up-to-date information to best help your customers. We aim to give ours a tidy-up at least once or twice a year, so that we can keep chugging along like a well-oiled machine!

Kelly Herring

Technical Support Specialist

More resources: 

• If you’re curious about how your team currently uses saved replies, Help Scout’s all channels report shows a list of your top used saved replies. 

• If your team is interested in auditing your saved replies, your account owner or administrator can reach out to our support team to request an export of all your saved replies.

• Want to learn how our team uses saved replies? We’ve got you covered.

Regularly maintain your Docs knowledge base

A knowledge base is a useful place where people can find the information they need, anytime they need it. Your customers can use your knowledge base to get a quick resolution without contacting your team. Providing this helpful self-service option not only benefits your customers, but you may find that it helps reduce the overall support volume as well. 

Whether you focus on building out your public-facing knowledge base or create a private Docs site for internal use, your support team — and turnaround time — will benefit from it. Rather than having to spend time looking for information across various resources, a Docs site can serve as a primary source of knowledge, allowing your team to respond to customers more quickly.

Docs are great for new hires, too. Knowledge bases give folks in their onboarding period access to extensive product and/or procedural information, allowing them to get up to speed more quickly than if they had to ask their co-workers each time they ran into an issue. 

Use AI Drafts to assist in crafting replies  

Help Scout’s AI feature, AI Drafts, can be used to generate replies to incoming messages from your customers. Your team can use AI Drafts to spin up an initial drafted reply, and then they can refine and edit it, ensuring it’s good to go before hitting send.

Starting with an AI draft can also be useful as a way to help get “unstuck” on a challenging conversation. A generated draft can help point you in the right direction, and having that initial boost can help you untangle the conversation, getting the customer back on track more quickly.

Pro tip: AI Drafts learns from previous conversations and your knowledge base content, so having a well-maintained Docs site will ensure your AI generated drafts are always based on the most up-to-date  information.

Strategize with your team

We hope these ideas are helpful and that you can use them to kick off a brainstorming session on ways to approach improving your response time. Perhaps some of the ideas here sound like they would work for your team, or they might inspire some different, fresh strategies.

Either way, we’d love to hear what solutions you land on and how they’re working out for you!