Take customer relationships off hold

By Eric Camulli, Director of Technology, Virtual Hold Technology

We wait for things every day: for the coffee pot to finish brewing, for our popcorn to finish popping; and we don’t get annoyed. Yet for some strange reason, when customers call your business and wait on hold for a few minutes, they perceive that you don’t care enough about them to answer their call immediately. In fact, a Call Voice study indicated that 64 percent of American consumers feel companies with which they frequently interact via telephone are not very respectful of their time.

Some contact center professionals may disagree. After all, it’s impossible to staff for unpredictable peaks in call volume, and a few minutes really are not that long to wait. But if you put yourself in your customer’s shoes, then you’ll understand the impact of hold time on your business.

Imagine calling your insurance company because your newly finished basement is flooding after a hard rain and you’re not sure it’s covered by your policy. Imagine you call your bank because you need to dispute some mysterious charges and you’re nervous about possible identity theft. Or imagine your Internet connection went down the day tickets went on sale for The Police reunion tour. Whatever the issue, you want answers… fast.

So you call for help and you’re put on hold, but because you don’t know how long you will be on hold, the minutes feel like hours. In fact, as time keeps ticking, your feelings begin to escalate from annoyed… to aggravated… to flat-out insulted. Eventually, you reach a threshold of intolerance where you begin to question why you’re even doing business with this company. By this point, companies are out of time if they plan to keep your business.

It’s too bad we don’t know where this threshold of intolerance is located. If we knew that customers would feel aggravated at a certain point, then we could structure our service levels accordingly. Unfortunately, the when and why behind each person’s intolerance is dependent upon a myriad of variables that change every day. Things like prior experiences, expectations and people’s moods may be different each time they pick up the phone and call you. Waiting on hold for two minutes may be perfectly acceptable one day and the “last straw” the next day.

To make the situation even more difficult, today’s consumers are more willing to switch brands then at any time in the past. Product managers have done an excellent job in recent years of making sure their goods and services are extremely easy to buy. Ad campaigns consistently hit us with messages about how easy it is to switch brands. Modern technology has enabled this, and great marketing has ignited it. In an age of phone number portability, “that was easy” and “15 minutes could save you 15 percent,” we are assured that there is no pain or suffering associated with trying something new. So we do. And if it doesn’t work out, we switch back — with activation fees waived, of course. Consumers today are like Goldilocks — testing and trying until they get it just right, leaving a wake of broken vendors behind them.

Customers are not privy to your excellent first-call resolution rates and high service level attainment metrics for the month, nor do they care. All they know, as customers of yours, is that when they tried to call, somewhere in that stellar month of yours, they waited on hold and hated it. For that reason, providing positive customer experiences are more important than ever before. Tangible experiences with your company are the only things that customers have when considering whether they want to continue their relationship with you.

Stats and numbers can be quite deceiving when evaluating your company’s customer satisfaction performance. A lot of attention is only paid to the shiny side of the coin, such as a company boasting, “92 percent of our customers indicated that they were satisfied or extremely satisfied with our service.” But what about the other side of the coin? Ironically, this eight percent figure may represent thousands of customers depending on your business, and unfortunately companies often ignore or forget them. While waiting on hold, the eight percent has a lot of time to perform a mental cost-benefit analysis and evaluate their relationship with you. The eight percent must be given more attention than the 92 if you expect your business to grow instead of just barely keeping ahead of churn and defections. Companies need to quantify how much each customer satisfaction percentage point equals in terms of number of customers, existing revenue and future revenue. Only then will management get truly serious about improving customer service and increasing customer satisfaction.

In your organization, customer service initiatives are a top priority. It’s true that almost every executive will state a commitment to customer satisfaction. If so, then please explain why customers continue to experience bad service. As outlined above, it’s because companies fail to examine and measure customer satisfaction as seriously as other metrics. There should be a lost revenue amount calculated each time a customer waits on hold for a few minutes and then hangs up. After all, that customer may never call you again. Even worse, he may be a blogger and tell the story of his poor experience to thousands of potential customers and really put a damper on your company’s growth potential.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Technology that improves the customer calling experience is cost-justifiable. Start by announcing the estimated wait time, which is proven to reduce caller anxiety. Consider virtual queuing technology, which allows callers to receive a callback in the same amount of time that they would have waited on hold, without losing their place in line. This allows your customers to do other things instead of waiting on hold until a contact center agent is available. It’s a viable alternative to staffing for a peak that happens only twice a day.

It is undeniable that these events happen, and we only need our personal experiences to convince us. Yet, it’s surprising that so few companies will take the time to quantify these lost opportunities. Perhaps the exercise is too difficult. Maybe nobody knows how to do it. But in a fiscal quarter-driven business world, if it’s not quantified, it’s not taken seriously. As a customer service professional, it’s your job to take hold time seriously; however, you may have had trouble over the years selling your ideas up the ladder. It’s not surprising. In order to boost profit, the operational expenses required to elevate customer service (technology and head count) are traditionally slashed, thus perpetuating your company’s marketplace mediocrity.

Additionally, you must place yourself in your customers’ shoes and call your own contact center. Call when they would call, which is most likely after work. Then listen and interact objectively with the different people and systems that comprise your company’s front line. Observe and document your experiences, as well as your emotional and behavioral responses. Next, invite others on your team to perform the same exercise. Actual experience will be more valuable to your organization than any statistics.

Once your organization brings the total customer experience into focus, then you will begin to take meaningful strides toward increasing market share. Address hold time issues in your contact center, and you will take away the opportunity for customers to question whether they wish to continue giving you their business.