Providing great customer service can help you stand out from the crowd, win over customers for life and get lots of word-of-mouth referrals.

When it comes to customer service, the age-old question remains. Speed vs. quality — what’s most important?

Too often, small business owners see these two things as mutually exclusive, believing that they always have to sacrifice quality for speed. But, the truth is that speed and quality are two sides of the same coin.

Think about your own experiences. When something is slow, you perceive that as low quality. Even if the end quality of the product is amazing, if the service is slow and you’re forced to wait for an extended period of time, it’s often perceived as a low-quality experience.

At the end of the day, the faster you can deliver your service or product, the more quality you can drive. But, the trick is to be able to provide that faster service without sacrificing quality. How do you drive quality while also driving speed? How you can make your process faster, execute more efficiently and deliver more quickly?

Today, we’re going to walk through seven tips on how you can reinforce speed within and drive success.

 

#1. Increase the speed of your response

When your customers or potential customers reach out to you, how fast are you getting back to them? When a customer emails you, how quickly do you respond? When a customer has an issue, what’s your speed of response?

Think about all of the ways that your customers communicate with you, and how you can increase the speed of your response.

Communication is so important to the success of a great customer relationship and a great customer experience. And a big piece of effective communication is simply responding promptly.

Prioritize responding to your customers and prospects, and use tools and technology, like Facebook Messenger or a chatbot, to respond in real-time.

#2. Increase the speed of your delivery

The speed of your delivery is how quickly you deliver a product or service to your customers.

When you get an order for your product, how can you increase the speed of getting that product shipped? How can you increase the speed at which your customer receives it?

When you have a customer that buys a service from you, how can you increase the speed of booking an appointment or the speed at which the service is delivered?

Think about every step of the process, simplify it and make it super fast. Speeding up how quickly you can deliver your service or product is one of the biggest ways that you can increase the perceived quality of your customer experience.

#3. Increase the speed of your turnaround

When a customer needs to make a change to an appointment or order, how quickly can you accommodate their needs? How quickly can you exchange a product that doesn’t meet their needs for one that does, or refund money for a service that failed to meet their expectations?

This is your turnaround time.

Too often, small businesses fail here. They get the initial sale and then backburner exchange orders or customer refunds.

However, this is really the time when you need to go even faster because this is a customer who likely isn’t having a good experience to begin with. Failing the speed of the turnaround is what leads to unhappy customers, one-star reviews and negative word of mouth.

Whether a customer needs to reschedule an appointment, make changes to an upcoming service or return a product, you need to be lightning-fast in your turnaround. That means making fast customer service a priority in your business.

#4. Increase the speed of your feedback

Real-time feedback, both internal and external, is the key to success in any business. But, feedback will do you no good if you just sit on it.

Internally, that means having a company culture where issues with employee performance and processes are addressed as they come up instead of during annual reviews or monthly meetings.

Why would you wait to sort things out and address issues? You should create a culture of real-time caring candor and real-time feedback. This is what allows you to get better and ensures everyone is on the same page.

The same rule applies when your customers give you feedback. In order to provide the best possible customer experience, you need to give your customers a way to give you feedback in real-time, and you also need to be able to respond in real-time to customer feedback.

Don’t let your customers dangle when they give you feedback. Let them know that you’re listening right away, and tell them how you’ll use their feedback to improve your customer experience.

Whether it’s internal or external, feedback needs to happen in real-time.

#5. Increase the speed of your meetings

Meetings are often an important part of making sure everyone in your team is working cohesively and from the same information. However, they can also be very time-consuming if you’re not running them efficiently.

Inefficient meetings can be a huge time-waster in the modern business world, taking your employees away from their number one job — serving your customers.

Don’t let your meetings become a waste of time. Try to make your meetings fast, and put a time limit on meetings ahead of time.

When you only have 15 minutes to meet with your team, you’ll limit your presentation to only the meat and bones. Whereas, when you have an hour to go over your material, you’re a lot more likely to let your thoughts wander and get off track.

In addition to freeing up more time in your team’s schedule, shorter meetings make it easier for your employees to focus on what you’re saying.

Try to schedule all of your meetings in 15-minute blocks as much as possible. Make your meetings fast, efficient and quick so that your employees can get back to their jobs.

Even if shortening your meetings to 15 meetings means you have to meet more often, there’s still an advantage to having short meetings more often than long meetings less often.

Obviously, there’s still a time and a place for longer, more strategic meetings. But as a general rule, aim to keep your meetings at 15 minutes or fewer.

#6. Increase the speed of training your employees

Speed of training is important. You need to train your team. Both new people and existing employees need to be properly trained in order to do their jobs efficiently. But the speed at which you train your employees needs to be fast.

A long, belabored training process can be costly for your business. Not only does it take time out of your schedule in order to train your employees, but it can also hinder your trainees’ ability to fully absorb the information.

Although everyone learns differently, most people are apt to learn a lot more quickly when they actually start doing the work. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t supervise or guide your employees in training, but it does mean that you should allow them to do the work earlier in the training process.

Plus, if you can get them doing the work and providing value, it helps to offset the cost of training for your business.

You don’t necessarily need to train them on everything right away, either. Pick one thing they can start doing out the gate, and let them practice it for part of the day. Then, devote the second half of their shift to training on something else. This way, they’re adding value as they’re learning.

Review your training process, and think about the ways your employees can value sooner in the training process, as well as how you can make your training process more efficient and effective.

#7. Increase the value you place on speed in your culture

One of the best ways to increase the overall speed of how you do business is to create a company culture that values and is passionate about speed.

Talk about speed all the time. Ask for your team’s input on what may be slowing your process down and what you can do to speed things up.

And when your employees get things done quickly or beat speed expectations, celebrate their success!

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Almost nothing hurts the customer experience more than a long delay. Increasing speed in your business is one of the best things you can do to improve the perceived quality of your customer service.