Operations
How fast does your team reply to buyers?
Most owners cannot answer this. What to measure, and how response time keeps buyers coming back.
Contents
- Buyers rarely complain about slow replies. They just order from someone else next time.
- Three numbers tell you how well your team serves buyers: time to first reply, time to close and issues reopened.
- You should be able to see them without asking anyone.
The loss you never see
A buyer stops ordering. You call to ask why. They are polite: prices, a change in their market, a new supplier closer to home. Sometimes that is true. Often the real reason is simpler. Over the past year, every small request took too long, and they found someone easier to work with.
Price gets you the first order. Service gets you the second, third and tenth. And in most export businesses, the owner has no way to see how good that service is until a buyer leaves.
Three numbers to watch
1. Time to first reply. How long from the buyer's message to a real reply from your team. Not "noted, will check", but an answer or a clear date for one. Buyers in different time zones often wait overnight already. A same-day first reply is a reasonable standard.
2. Time to close. How long from the request to the issue being fully resolved: the corrected document sent, the claim settled, the question answered. Some issues take time for good reasons. But if simple requests take a week, something is wrong.
3. Issues reopened. How often a buyer comes back saying the problem is not fixed. A reopened issue costs twice: your team's time again, and the buyer's patience.
Look at these by buyer and by team member. The averages hide the problems. One important buyer with slow replies matters more than a good overall figure.
Why you cannot see them today
In most businesses, buyer requests arrive on WhatsApp, email and phone, to different people. There is no record of when a request came in or when it was resolved. Asking the team gives you their impression, which is always better than the reality.
To measure response, each request must be recorded with a time when it arrives and a time when it closes. That is exactly what a ticket does.
What to do with the numbers
Set simple standards. For example: every buyer request gets a first reply within one working day, and simple document corrections are closed within two.
Review the slowest, not the average. Each week, look at the five oldest open issues and ask why.
Find the cause, not the person. Slow replies usually come from waiting on another team or a supplier. Fix that dependency and the replies speed up.
Share good results with buyers. A buyer told "we fixed 95% of your requests within two days this year" hears that you take them seriously.
How Expodite helps. In Expodite, every buyer request can be recorded as a ticket on that buyer's order or shipment. Tickets record when a request was raised, first answered, resolved and reopened. The tickets dashboard shows average first response and resolution time for any period, compared with the period before, for the whole team or one person.
See tickets in ExpoditeQuestions to ask your team
- Which buyer had the slowest replies from us last month, and why?
- How many buyer requests are open right now, and how old is the oldest?
- Which requests most often wait on another team?
- Have any buyers raised the same issue twice this year?
- What standard for replies would we be proud to tell our buyers about?
Quick answers
- How quickly should an exporter reply to a buyer?
- A same-day first reply, or within one working day across time zones, is a reasonable standard. Simple requests should be resolved within a few days.
- How can I measure my team's response time to buyers?
- Record each request when it arrives and when it is resolved. A ticketing system does this automatically and reports it for the team and for each person.
