“Your call is important to us…” but is it really? How long do customers expect to be on hold? According to a survey of 2,500 consumers, nearly 60% of respondents believe that one minute is already too long to be on hold. A further 32.3% believe that customer service departments should be answering immediately with no hold time at all.
After 60 seconds, how can you expect wait times to impact your business?
First impressions matter: one bad experience can stay with a customer forever. Experiences dictate future actions, and this means that long queues and wait times impact your net promoter scores (and other ratings) more than you know.
“Often, the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself.” – M.I.T. Researcher Richard Larson.
Research continues to show the uphill battle businesses face when customer experience journeys are not mapped. 95% of consumers say customer service influences their brand loyalty, while 80% of companies expect to be competing mainly on customer experience. 60% of customers say they will hang up after being on hold for a minute. From brand loyalty, 1-star reviews to an increase in customer churn, you can no longer afford to keep your customers on hold.
Research suggests that parents who directly communicate their sentiments about a brand to their children, influence the children’s perception of the brand. The impact of a bad experience can, therefore, impact the future buyers market, not just the current buyers.
What are contact centres to do?
The increase in channels makes it easier for customers to contact you, but the phone is not going anywhere any time soon. According to a study, 92% of all customer interactions happen over the phone. Here are three ways to improve the customer experience:
Callback Strategies
A survey polled over 1,100 consumers and found that 63% preferred callbacks. Using callback technology is one of the crucial customer service strategies that are prevalent in today’s industry. The two key callback options being instant callback and scheduled callback.
“Providing technological functionality to support and improve customer services is imperative. Therefore providing this and many other automated conditions and service makes for a great consumer brand experience. Smartz Solutions does all this natively. “ – Henry McCracken, CEO, Smartz Solutions South Africa
Reporting and analytics
Data-driven companies continue to make leaps in their respective industries. In the call centre industry, you must be leveraging your data in useful, strategic ways. Good analytics that shows the number of customers being left on hold, how many are waiting in the queue, and average wait times, as examples, helps contact centres react in real-time.
Predictive Technologies
Monitoring the wait time of customers is essential. With Smartz Communications, you can do this and redirect interactions to agents with similar profiles if the wait time is longer than the recommended time frame. Predictive technologies will improve the customer experience journey – because it understands and simplifies customer interactions through intelligent routing and machine learning methodologies. Read more about Smartz Solutions proprietary technology, A.I.D. ( Automated Interaction Distribution) and the Smartz Communications Predictive dialler here.
Schedule a call to understand your contact centre here
About Smartz Solutions
Smartz Solutions specializes in managing customer and employee experiences through our enabling technology. Our success is based on technological foresight and strong business knowledge, enabling us to develop integrated solutions that meet your business needs. Our power lies in turning insights into strategies and giving you the power to make effective business decisions. Based on a wealth of knowledge covering multiple industries, we have developed a suite of products that include the entire customer engagement journey offering best-in-class, world-class applications in a single end-to-end CX and EX platform.