Long call hold times can negatively impact customer satisfaction and customer experiences. This, in turn, restricts businesses from attaining high success rates and creating a loyal customer base. In order to avoid such consequences, businesses reach out to certified USA contact centers delivering top professional services.
Top-performing contact centers monitor the average call hold times to measure agents’ efficiency in handling calls and delivering appropriate solutions quickly. Their skilled agents use the best practices to reduce the time a customer waits in the call queue before an agent joins the call.
What causes long call hold times?
Long call hold times can happen for multiple reasons. These include –
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Understaffing and poor workforce management:
Being one of the most troubling reasons why customers experience long call hold times, understaffing and poor workforce management can be a massive headache for contact center companies. Customers suffer massively when call centers do not have adequate agents to handle large volumes of incoming customer communications or unusual spikes in their volumes on certain occasions. Theis leads to customers failing to connect with the right agents, which automatically increases their average call hold times.
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Long call handling times:
Agents with poor knowledge about brand products or services find it difficult to answer customer questions appropriately. This involves multiple call transfers and simultaneously increases call hold time. Every time a customer is transferred from one agent to another, they have to go through the pain of staying on hold while waiting to be connected to the agent eventually. These long call hold times between call transfers can be of great inconvenience to the customers, and create unsatisfactory experiences.
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Poor access to advanced technology:
Many modern USA contact centers provide easy access to advanced technology that assists agents in resolving queries. Without proper access to these automated solutions, agents are likely to find it incredibly challenging to provide prompt, accurate, and convenient solutions to customers. This will also make it easier for the customer support representatives to understand customer issues, determine root causes, identify appropriate solutions and deliver superior CX with prompt resolutions.
How can you reduce long call hold times and experience a high customer satisfaction rate?
Completely eliminating call-on-hold in a contact center may not be possible. But contact centers can surely reduce the average call hold times and help businesses experience better customer satisfaction. Many experienced Montreal call centers use the best strategy to work on these metrics. Let’s take a closer look at them.
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Better self-service options:
People these days are too busy with their daily lives and activities to spend long hours waiting for an answer either over a call or over a chat. They usually wait for a few minutes and then immediately look for an alternative to meet their specific requirements. This leads to high call abandonment rates and eventually creates a high risk of losing customers.
Introducing self-service options using advanced technologies, contact centers ensure that every customer stays engaged with the brand. In addition, it eliminates the need for making a call and seeking human assistance to resolve a query. As a result, customers do not have to wait for an agent to provide answers. Instead, they can resolve their own problems instantly, thereby reducing long call waiting times.
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Optimize call routing:
Customers always intend to resolve their issues quickly and efficiently. Hence, keeping them waiting in a long queue over a call is definitely a bad practice. One interesting way to avoid such a long waiting time is by optimizing call routing.
Call routing is a technique that distributes incoming calls to a team of agents. This minimizes the long queues and simultaneously improves first-call resolutions. Instead of forwarding calls while interacting with customers, the call routing feature help manages a high volume of incoming calls. Therefore, looking out for USA contact centers that prioritize this technique can be an impressive approach.
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Introduce a knowledge base:
A knowledge base is a centralized repository that assists users in gaining knowledge about brand products or services. Therefore, introducing this tool help agents assist customers or prospects whenever they send an inquiry or look for solutions to their issues. This is indeed the best way to handle customer calls better and faster compared to other techniques.
Knowledge bases are essential to running the customer support process successfully. They keep agents engaged throughout the calls and prompt them with information whenever they face difficulties in finding accurate answers to their queries. These tools are loaded with updated information in the form of tutorials. Hence, when they are integrated with any system, they help improve every call and boost customer experiences.
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Training agents:
One of the biggest reasons why customers experience long hold time is due to a lack of agents’ knowledge regarding the brand products or services. Customers reaching out to such agents often fail to get instant answers to their questions. In such scenarios, long call waits and frequent call transfers are pretty normal. As a result, customers are less likely to stay connected with these brands.
Many contact centers conduct training and development programs for agents to reduce the long call waiting times. They monitor agents’ performance and efficiency continuously, measure the important parameters and run several training sessions accordingly. Moreover, they use tools to listen to customer calls, analyze customer interactions with agents, and set up learning and development programs based on these analytical data. Such programs help improve agents’ knowledge base and skillsets, using them to deliver instant and accurate responses.
Reduce call hold times for better customer experiences
Call centers have the necessary expertise in monitoring key performance indicators to keep a note of their overall performances and maximize efficiencies. Among those important KPIs, average call hold time is a crucial parameter that requires special attention. It impacts customer satisfaction levels, customer retention, brand reputation, and brand loyalty.
Any business struggling with poor customer experiences can reach out to a Montreal call center that offers omnichannel engagement. These modern call centers leverage advanced techniques to deliver exceptional service.
