How Eliminating Hold Times Can Help Your Company Improve Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Phone calls coming into your business are a great thing. If the phone is ringing, it indicates that your company is doing well. However, if you keep customers waiting on the line for too long, this might not last. Leaving customers on hold can have a very detrimental impact on your business. However, there are some easy steps that you can take to reduce hold times and keep your customers happy.
Hold Time Guidelines
There are a few schools of thought on how long is too long to leave customers on hold. Studies done on people calling into call centers have found that some people will wait for less than two minutes before hanging up. Other investigations have shown that customers can get angry with a company if they have to wait more than 12 minutes. If you let customers wait that long, there is a good chance they’ll be ready to walk away for your organization altogether. Time Magazine found that the average person spends 13 hours on hold every year. With that much time spent being stuck on hold it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people are getting impatient.
While the exact amount of time that a customer will wait is up for debate, the bottom line here is that long wait times lead to angry customers. If you want to avoid this, you need to put some measures in place to ensure that customers are taken care of as promptly as possible.
Reputation Management
On hold times have magnifications beyond a single unsatisfied customer. The problem is that people who have bad experiences are very likely to communicate those experiences to other people. Bad customer service experiences travel through word-of-mouth and online reviews much faster than good ones do, and long hold times are one of the largest factors that can prompt people to say things that could critically damage your reputation among their peers. Couple that with the fact that you’ve likely lost the initial caller as a customer as well, and the need to reduce hold times becomes very clear.
How to Decrease Hold Times
If long hold-times are an issue for your company, Acena can help. Our professional call center services can eliminate on-hold times for your customers, because we never put a caller on hold. We answer quickly and give that person our undivided attention until the call is complete. Quick answering and focused call resolution helps customers complete their business in short measure. We’re experts in customer service and call center management. By letting us handle this end of your business, you’re free to improve core areas of your organization while we keep your customers happy.
Contact us today if you’re interested in learning more about how we can make holds a thing of the past for your callers.
More posts you might want to check out:
Long Hold Times Make For Angry Customers
The Right Way To Put A Customer On Hold
The Perfect Customer Service Handoff