Waiting on hold is a reality for most businesses. Whether you’re dealing with customer service, sales, or support issues, your customers will often have to wait while they speak with an agent. Unfortunately, this can cause frustration and even drive customers away from your business.
Even the mail online www.thisismoney.co.uk website has launched a campaign called “Pick up or pay up” calling for new laws and fines for firms that don’t answer their calls within 10 minutes.
But there are ways that you can make waiting on hold less stressful (and more productive) for both the customer and the employee who’s taking their call. Here are some tips for making your business more efficient:
Before implementing the solution.
Before implementing the solution, you’ll want to consider why reducing your hold times is important and what benefits reducing them would bring.
- Reduce customer frustration: The longer your customers have to wait on hold, the more frustrated they will get. This can lead them to abandon calls or think poorly of your business.
- Save money: If people hang up before speaking with an agent, companies lose potential sales; if they’re put on hold while waiting for an agent but then hang up after being put through a queue, companies lose potential sales again; if customers leave their information but never speak with an agent, that company also loses out on potential sales by not converting leads into customers (and so forth).
- Meet your target KPIs: If you have specific KPIs, you will be able to monitor how well your IVR is doing in meeting those KPIs. You can also use this information to determine which features need improvement or removal. Reduce the amount of time agents spend on hold: If callers are put on hold for too long or are transferred back and forth between multiple people in the queue, they may hang up before speaking with anyone at all.
In addition to these costs of not reducing hold times, there are other benefits businesses can reap from reducing their call centre wait times as well:
The solution.
If your business is like most, you have a lot to offer, but sometimes your customers have to wait. Most businesses are able to reduce the time their callers spend waiting on hold by implementing an automated system that will provide the caller with an option to receive a callback instead of waiting on hold. This can reduce your average hold time and improve your customer experience significantly!
Benefits.
You can achieve all of the following by reducing hold times:
- Improve customer experience. Callers will be happier and feel like they’re being taken care of, which will boost their confidence in your business.
- Increase sales. Customers who feel valued are more likely to buy from you and recommend you to others, so improving customer experience is also an opportunity for growth.
- Reduce wait times for customers calling in with questions or complaints about products or services, reducing stress on staff members who have to handle these calls.
- Reduce costs associated with paying someone to answer phones when no one’s waiting on hold (or if there is a long wait time). You’ll also save money by cutting back on expenses like equipment maintenance fees, which are often incurred with overused phone lines that employees don’t properly maintain or contractors hired specifically for this purpose—or, worse yet—unnecessarily installed in the first place!
Improve customer experience with music and real-time notifications while waiting on hold.
Improve customer experience with music and real-time notifications while waiting on hold.
You want to increase customer satisfaction and retention rates as a business owner. One of the best ways to do this is by reducing wait times on the phone by making sure that your customers do not have to spend hours on hold before speaking with a customer service representative. By providing customers with entertainment while they wait in the queue, you can make their experience more enjoyable, which will ultimately lead to higher ratings and better results for your business.
Conclusion
While the onus is on businesses to improve their customer service and satisfaction levels, we believe that implementing our Queue Buster solution will go a long way towards helping them achieve this goal. We are confident that once you try out our platform, you will find it difficult to go back to using an old-fashioned telephone system for your business.
