Customer support is no longer about solving issues for your customers to make them happy. Your customers now want you to help very quickly when they have problems. Many businesses don’t know how important it is to their business. Research shows about 65% of customers stop patronising a business because it takes too long to resolve their issues. In this article, you’ll learn what resolution time within the Jira environment means and how to lower it and improve your customers’ experience.
What is Resolution Time?
Resolution time, often known as time to resolution or mean time to resolution (MTTR), measures how long it takes for a customer to get help and solve their problem when they contact your business's support team on Jira. It starts when a customer reaches out to you for help and includes the time they wait for your response and any extra time between messages. This resolution time ends when you fix the issue, your customer is satisfied, and the conversation ends.
Why is Time to Resolution Important?
Resolution time is very important because it affects how happy customers are. When you quickly solve their problems, they feel good about your service. But if it takes too long, they might get upset and lose trust in your company. Fast solutions show that your team works well and knows what they're doing. A study shows that about 83% of customers are loyal to companies that respond to their complaints. So, this shows that apart from offering quality services to customers, how well and fast you respond to them matters a lot, too.
What is a Good Resolution Time?
What you can consider a good resolution time mostly depends on your business type and how complicated the problems are. For some businesses, it means somewhere around an hour to a day; and for some others, anything between 5 – 10 minutes works fine. However, research shows that 60% of customers say that "immediate" or good resolution time is anything under 10 minutes.
How to Measure Resolution Time?
When it comes to calculating resolution time for issues in Jira, there are a couple of key points to understand. In Atlassian documentation, the resolution time is calculated as the difference between an issue's resolution date and its created date. However, this gets a bit more nuanced when issues are reopened after initially being resolved. In those cases, the resolution time is determined by taking the difference between the latest, and most recent resolution date and the original created date of the issue.
Another aspect to note is how Jira handles fractional resolution times. Let's say an issue had a resolution time of 4/3 days, which equates to 1.333 days. In this scenario, Jira will truncate/round down the fractional portion, counting it simply as 1 day rather than rounding up to 2 days. So any fractional resolution times ultimately get floored to the nearest whole-day value. The resolution time calculations aim to provide an easily interpretable metric, eschewing potential decimals for clean whole-day measurements.
How to Reduce Time to Resolution?
1. Proactive Engagement:
Proactive engagement in customer support involves reaching out to your customers before they raise any issues and providing the solutions they’ll need. You need to engage with customers proactively to address their issues before they escalate and not get them frustrated. This approach can lead to a more positive customer experience and has been shown to lower resolution times.
HelpLama’s study shows that 89% of consumers find proactive customer service a great experience and huge customer support.
2. Thorough Initial Communication
Ask thoughtful questions and encourage your customers to provide detailed explanations of their problems upfront. Studies have shown that following thorough initial communication practices leads to significant improvements, such as a 20% increase in first-contact resolution rates and a 15% decrease in total resolution times.
3. Analysing and Addressing Ticket Patterns for Improved Resolution Efficiency
You should always look out for tickets that take a long time to resolve for specific products or services and that will help you identify areas you need to improve. When you address these time-consuming issues, you’ll make your customer service more effective.
4. Optimise your First-Contact Resolution Rate
It's really important to do what you can to fix customer issues right away when they first reach out. This helps you gain even more trust and keep them coming back. You should pay attention to what customers need and fix things fast.
5. Leverage Technology
Adopting tech in customer service means using tools like chatbots, smart AI programmes, and automatic systems to quickly handle common questions and make customer support smoother. Research by Gartner says that by 2025, companies using AI in their customer service could get 25% better at getting things done. These tech tools not only make things faster but also make customers happier by giving them fast and right answers. The good thing is that you can train these tools to help you answer customers. So that way, they won’t be giving wrong answers, which will escalate the issue.
6. Solve the critical issues first
When something serious happens, like a big issue affecting lots of people or causing legal trouble, it’s important you work on solving that issue first and very quickly. The minor ones will follow later. And it’s not until multiple customers start contacting you that you know that the issue is critical.
You can use prioritization charts and good ticket systems to help you manage these urgent issues and know which issues are the most significant to start with. When you deal with those, you’ll reduce the tension in your customers’ minds, and therefore, you’ll get more time to solve the remaining issues.
Conclusion
How good your business’ resolution time is really says a lot about your business to customers. And that’s why you must fix problems quickly to keep customers satisfied. In fact, it’s safe to say how well you’re able to identify their issues and give them solutions is just as important as offering them quality service. You can easily lower your resolution time by reaching out to your customers before they complain and fixing big problems first. That way, you give your business more credibility.
However, optimizing resolution times can be a complex undertaking, often requiring specialized expertise and resources. This is where onpoint can be an invaluable partner. Our team of Atlassian professionals are well-versed in implementing best practices, streamlining processes, and leveraging cutting-edge technologies to revolutionize your customer support operations.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation and discover how our tailored solutions can transform your resolution times, delight your customers and drive long-term success.
Comments