TAT is an integral part of final customer-experience

  A timely response to customers forms a pivotal part in the overall customer experience extended to them.

Customers ask for a service, make a query or register a request with huge expectations from a company, underneath lies a hope to get the quickest of responses.

What is TAT or turnaround Time?

The average time taken by the company to turn around and respond to a client/request is called its Turnaround Time or TAT.

The length of this TAT goes a long way to make customers stay with a company or leave it

Customers want to get respect, they want their requests to be heard earnestly, they want to feel that they are esteemed and there is no way better by handling their request in a time-bound manner.

Being ignored is the worst emotion they can bear and they will carry a poor image of the organisation in their mind. While a brand spends a fortune in building its reputation, a poor TAT or no reply from the organisation will ruin it instantly.

Once they are on board with you, they can bear anything but neglect. Your products or services may be of top-tier quality, but if you don’t meet their expectations in responding properly to them in time, you are not going to retain them.

Companies must declare the TAT both to company employees and customers so that there is no expectation mismatch. For example here in Recherche Digital, we have a TAT of 3 hours for customers on all working days.

Every person in the organisation is bound to reply from earliest to a maximum of 3 hours on working days. While employees follow the TAT religiously, customers must also be informed about maximum waiting time. This includes the enquiry of our service even on the form we declared how long they should expect the response.

Here are two ideal processes of declaring TAT

• Define and communicate TAT to each employee in the organisation. Make this part of onboarding and all customer-facing/handling staff must aware of this. This is called external TAT

• The customer must also be aware of TAT so that he knows when his query shall be responded to. The information may be communicated to the customer while signing the deal or in verbal communication by the marketing executive who is handling the deal

• All information may be kept on the system or in the self-help portal of the website for standardisation and both internal & external parties can see that as a standard in the organisation

While most of the time TAT ( Turnaround Time ) is only related to external customers or deals but same may be well used inside the company (internal TAT)

Like in Recherche we have internal TAT of five hours that means any employee can expect a response from any member including management member within five hours

Why TAT is important?

• The number one reason for having TAT is setting the expectation of customers and giving them a reasonable time of response from the organisation side.

• Imagine that you are having a dialogue with your friend, how you feel when you don’t receive a response after you finish asking a question…. awkward right.. same is true in client-vendor relation. If one is asking a query or sharing a point then an answer is expected from the other end within a set period.

• It is a well-known fact that responding to a client in the least minimum time increases customer satisfaction and sometimes became the reason for elation.

• Frequently delayed responses lead you to loss of customers and eventually, loss of revenue.

• Conversely, if you wish to transform into a brand and have an accumulation of dedicated customers, a mechanism must be ingrained in your organization wherein qualitative products or services are backed up by efficient and well-timed customer responses.

• Communication consistently with your customers solves the problem seamlessly. If your organization’s employees are constantly communicating with your clients, who may be there for different requirements, they are always in the know what clients want individually and when they know their demands, they can respond aptly on a timely basis after collaborating among themselves.

• Online modes have solved the matter even more accurately and seamlessly. This is a useful way of keeping a record of service requests, helping both parties to keep track of demands and responses. Live online-medium becomes a bridge for instant solutions and responses. But as per experiences, customers get satisfaction when they get to talk to representatives of the company.

In many companies during the contract formation, TAT is specially motioned and agreed upon, for example for critical services TAT may from Instant to a maximum of an hour time while in non-critical services it may be beyond 1 hour to a day.

TAT to a customer is undeniably an integral part of the final customer experience delivered by businesses. Sometimes, quicker responses cover the mistakes in the delivery of services, customers are generally so happy with the quickness of the response that they gloss over the mistakes and move ahead.