When you let your customers feel important you must take into consideration their time. If you say “Your call is important to us”. Do you really mean it? And are you making your customers believe that they are? When you make a client wait, you don’t make them feel as important as you say so.
Being able to identify how long it takes you to answer your customers calls and help them through any problem or question is key for a great performance. One of the key performance indicators is called Average Wait time when it comes to a contact center.
What is an Average Wait time?
The Average Wait Time, also known as Average Speed of Answer is the time an inbound call spends waiting. This is different form the Average Handle Time which is the average time a calling agent takes to complete a call and solve the problem for a customer.
It is known that in traditional call centers the level or service is an 80/20, or 80% calls answered in 20 seconds.
Waiting time through the years
In 2014, the waiting time that callers were willing to wait was 13 minutes. We know this through a study by American Express who found out years later that customers were willing to wait up to two minutes for a call.
34% of the callers if not answered within that time period will hang up and not call back, this is known as the Abandonment Rate.
With this data we learn that the customers expectations are fast and growing. Adding a pandemic to this age of e-commerce and social media we understand that customers and consumers need a real- time service and call centers are no exceptions to these demands.
Reduce your Average Wait time
In order to reduce your Average Wait you must address certain issues that occur while you do your phone calls. Here are some of the tips that can reduce your companies long hold times:
- Optimization of your contact center call Queue
Ineffective Interactive Voice Responder can give confusing options for the callers and send them to misread and call wrong places. For this make sure you test your IVR in order to make sure your callers are quickly getting to the right department. This way you can help minimize the waiting time.
- Keep an eye on your Workforce Strategy
When working in a call center it is incredibly important to handle calls faster, efficiently and solve the caller’s needs in a short period of time. In order to resolve the customers’ issues and have high customer satisfaction you must have a high quality management in your staff. This can be by having representatives who keep your workforce motivated.
- Don’t rush through the solutions
Sometimes when you need to improve the customer experience the idea of making fast calls isn’t the one to fully complete the task. Being able to make the customer live a full positive experience is what truly matters, take your time while answering the questions and make your customer come out of the call relaxed, happy and in a friendly manner.
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