In the high-stakes sectors of Hotels, Villas, Real Estate, Edtech, and Automobiles, the time it takes to respond to a potential customer is more than a metric; it's a crucial determinant of sales success. This critical factor in sales conversions is starkly highlighted by two compelling statistics:

• Firstly, 78% of customers are likely to purchase from the company that responds first to their request or query. Isn’t that phenomenal?
• Secondly, research indicates that conversion rates are a staggering 8x higher when responses are made within the first five minutes as opposed to waiting between 5 minutes and 24 hours.

These statistics illustrate the crucial role of first response times in sales success. Today's customers are impatient - they will look at your website, give their requirements, and within minutes hop onto another website to see if they have a better offering. 

But these few minutes could be a make or break. If you can respond fast enough, you are likely to hook the customer and prevent them from talking to your competition. Our impatient customers don't have the time to speak in detail with more than 2-3 sellers before making a decision!

In this blog, we will explore the importance of first response time, strategies to achieve better response times, challenges in implementing these manually and how AI can help! 

Now, let’s understand what First Response Time is

First Response Time (FRT), in the context of Sales is a crucial aspect that measures the duration between a customer's initial inquiry and the company's first response to that inquiry. This aspect holds great importance in evaluating the responsiveness and effectiveness of a sales team. 

Factors affecting First Response Time:

1. Size of the Sales team: The larger the sales team size, faster you will be able to respond to customer inquiries. 
2. Business hours. Your customers can inquire at any time, even the odd hours (Outside normal business hours), which often creates a heap of inquiries for the sales team the next day.
3. Number of inquiries: The next factor affecting FRT is the growing volume of customer inquiries. When a business receives a lot of questions, it takes more time to respond to every query.
4. Finally, staff training also impacts FRT. The ones who are skilled and alert respond faster than the ones who are not. 

In the business spectrum, the clock always moves! Businesses who understand this concept and respond to prospects fast, are more likely to have meaningful conversations with the prospects, leading to major sales growth and ROI. On the other hand, those who ignore the ticking clock, which means they respond slowly to a prospect’s inquiry, risk losing their potential clients to their competition.

Why First Response Time holds great importance in the sales process?

A quick first response time lays the foundation for building customer trust. Responding quickly lets customers understand that you are taking their query seriously and will solve it in the fastest possible time.

Still wondering if first response time is important? Read through and you will be convinced!

1. Increased Conversions:

Remember, the opening section where we quoted that 78% customers buy from the business that responds to them fastest. The faster you respond, more likely it is that you become the first to respond to the customer and more are the chances of conversion. 

If a customer is looking for a service and sends an inquiry to your business and you respond within 5 minutes, then you have caught the customer at the moment of intent! He is more likely to speak with you and detail out his requirements. If you respond late, she might get busy with other priorities and your response might go in vain amongst several of your competitors. 

2. Improves Customer Satisfaction

In today’s digital environment, dominated by AI customers expect a fast reply! A prompt reply indicates that you value your customers' time and have the eagerness to assist them ASAP. Positive customer experience is the major factor that leaves an indelible brand imprint in a customer's mind.

On the other hand, delayed responses often make the customer dissatisfied and agitated. If the customers feel neglected at first, they will shift their focus toward the competitors. Timely responses help salespeople address customer concerns better and prevent dissatisfaction.

3. Gives you a competitive advantage.

In a competitive market, responding faster than your competitors can help you amp up your sales game. Customers often stick to the service or company who respond promptly and meet their needs effectively and efficiently. 

4. Builds Trust and credibility

Timely responses deliver a sense of professionalism. When customers receive a quick response, it increases their trust in your brand and establishes credibility. This consumer-focused attitude sets a strong foundation for trust, as customers feel valued.

How to reduce first response time – Strategies to implement in the sales process

Responding to a customer’s query within a few minutes can result in more conversions and increase your sales. If you want to make your customers the most promising ones, your sales representative must answer their queries within a minute.

‍1. Monitor and Analyse First Response Times - What doesn’t get measured doesn’t improve. The first step in your journey to improve response times is to start monitoring and analysing customer response times. Your Lead management system (LMS) or dialler systems may have the automated functionality or you can ask your Sales team to update each lead response time in the LMS. It is important to review this metric consistently with your Sales team to drive improvement. 

‍2. Increasing your Sales staff - Hiring more sales staff is a costly affair. However, adding more people to your team can help reduce first-response times.

‍3. Dedicated Response teams - You could establish a dedicated quick-response team whose primary focus is to respond to new leads promptly.

‍4. Enable your Team with right resources:‍

• CRM System: Have a robust CRM system to ensure your sales staff is alerted whenever a new lead is created in your system
• Training: Regularly train sales teams on the importance of quick responses and efficient handling of leads.
• Mobile accessibility: Ensure sales teams can access CRM and respond to leads on-the-go via mobile devices.

‍5. Prioritize Leads that should be responded Faster - Not all the customer requests are equal. Hence, it is always better to prioritise the leads. You can use an AI model like the one Brance provides for Lead Prioritization as it lets you prioritize your leads effectively.

‍6. Leverage AI Chatbots in your sales process (The Brance Way) - Implementing AI chatbots can easily resolve queries in the first response time while allowing the salesperson to focus on some other important work. However, it is important that you don’t use rule-based chatbots that don’t understand customer intent as such bots might actually frustrate your customers. Brance’s generative AI chatbots are specifically fine-tuned for Sales use cases and might be one of your best friends when it comes to optimizing first response times for all your leads!

‍Challenges in improving First Time Response!

Improving the first response time is not a cakewalk. It is more like walking on a rugged track consisting of hidden difficulties. Some of the key challenges and trade-offs faced by businesses while trying to reduce first response times are highlighted below:

• Increase in Costs: Improving first response times typically will involve increasing your team and technology investments, thereby increasing costs. 
• Lower Personalization: Speedy responses risk reducing the personalized touch, potentially impacting customer experience and satisfaction.
• Lead Prioritization for Better Response Rates: Effectively ranking leads to focus on high-potential interactions requires sophisticated analytics, which can be complex to implement manually.
• Cultural Changes: Adopting a rapid response culture necessitates shifts in team dynamics and attitudes, which can be met with resistance.
• After-Hours Responses: Providing 24/7 responses means investing in automation or extra shifts, impacting work-life balance and overheads.

The Fix: The Brance's Way – Using AI-driven technology. 

Maximize Conversions – The Brance way

If you are focused on reducing first response times, one of the easiest ways to do so is by implementing an automated response system in your sales process.

As you know, giving instant responses to your customers is what sets your business apart from the rest.

This is where Brance’s AI Chatbot comes into play!

This AI-driven chatbot makes sure every lead is responded to in less than a minute, thereby increasing the chances of lead conversion. 

Brance follows an AI-driven approach to boost the overall efficiency of the sales process, resulting in higher conversion rates. Our AI ensures that every lead receives a response within a minute, even at odd hours, which in turn results in a higher conversion rate.

Our AI Chatbot improves the conversion rates by:

1. Communicating round the clock - The AI chatbot never sleeps, unlike human agents. They initiate the communication at the time they receive a query, no matter the time, making sure that the salesperson responds to leads within the first five minutes.

2. Omni channel Communication - Our AI chatbot selects the most appropriate channel of communication for every lead, be it email, text, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, or other platforms, thereby optimizing the chances of a successful and meaningful interaction with the lead.

3. Giving the First time response at a lightning speed - Our AI ensures a timely response to the lead within a minute, thereby eliminating any kind of delays if the prospect inquires, even at odd hours.

4. Prioritizing Leads - Our AI chatbot uses advanced AI/ML algorithms, filtering and focusing on the most qualified leads to get promising results.

5. Personalized Messages - To stay competitive in the digital age, personalization is the key! We ensure high level of personalisation in communication, understanding her requirement and then recommending the right product from the suite of products that business has to offer. 

Final Say

Better Response times ultimately result in higher conversions and better customer experiences.

Hence, make your first response time fast enough to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Brance AI Chatbots are a cutting-edge technology that enable your business to experience a winning combination of a boost in sales & and maximum business value.

Get a FREE DEMO now to accelerate your sales growth and give ultra-fast responses to your queries!