Keeping The Caller Waiting

[Carrigman]

Any ideas on the format and content of messages to keep a caller waiting in queue rather than abandoning? What tends to work best? Is there an optimum time interval for the interruptible messages ("we regret all our agents are busy ..."etc)? Is there a particular type of music that has a proven positive effect, or whatever. What should definitely NOT be done?

In my instance letting the caller know where he or she is in the queue, or how long its likely to take to get through to an agent, is not currently an option. Given these restrictions, any advice would be welcome.

Many thanks.

John,
Ireland.

[tetron]

hi john

I run a call center that takes 25000-30000 calls daily. Our strategy for a caller in queue, is to post the first message quickly, 12 seconds into the queue. Then at 30 seconds and every 30 seconds after.

What I found that works the best is just make sure that you dont have one blanket statement such as "all of our agents are busy...." , you should make each wait message specific to the type of call the customer is making.

So a customer service call will be different then a sales call. Let me know if you would like some specific verbiage.

hope this helps a little.

[Karsten Fuhrmann]

Hi John,

what should not be done is to communicate "you're number xx in line" or "the expected waiting time is xx minutes". That will go wrong, because it will cause expectations.

Why don't you use the queue for marketing information or to reduce number of incoming calls. Here's an example: we figured out that a big number of calls were about to re-load a prepaid card. There was an IVR but no-one used it. So we used the queue to "promote" the IVR solution (you can do the same with your eMail, Internet etc.) and the call volume came done.

Good luck
Karsten Fuhrmann

[gholden]

Hi John,

We found that a regularly recurring message for long queue times eventually annoyed the customer, and also gave them an indication of how long they had been queueing. ("That's the tenth time i've heard this message...")

We solved this by running messages at progressively longer intervals (30 secs, 35 secs, 40 secs, 45 secs...) which gives the illusion of the customer queueing for less time, and reduces the annoyance factor.

Grant

[Bender]

Although, I am very interested in other's suggestions for good messages on a regular schedule, I am also intested in any suggestions for such times as when our cs department is out in a meeting. We used to run a message that told the caller when the department was returning from the meeting, but then we would get bombarded by calls at the time everyone returned.

We recently tried switching it to state "Please call back in two hours" in hopes for more staggered incoming calls, but haven't been doing this long enough to see trend yet.

Any other suggestions?

[Carrigman]

Thanks for the responses folks. I think the trick, when faced with long queue times, is to keep the customer hanging on by (a) varying the timing of the delay announcement and (b) telling the caller something interesting, something other than the obvious i.e. that we are still busy. For instance, a company could use the opportunity to tell the caller about some aspect of its business, other services, etc. And above all, never use that dreadful phrase: "your call is important to us"! It is also necessary, I think, to have the announcements professionally voiced. We currently use one of our staff, and while she has a nice speaking voice, I would like to experiment with someone who sounds more assertive and, well, professional. At the end of the day, I think each company needs to experiment and see what works best. Examine the average time to abandon and see if the changes you make produce a difference.

Thanks again, everybody.

John.