callback technology

[atrober]

Is anyone out there using callback technology (Avaya, Virtual Hold, Aspect, Genesys, etc.) where customers can hang up and receive a return call when an agent is available? What results have you seen?

[zoinks]

VirtualHold
We use VirtualHold to allow callers in queue to receive a call back without losing there spot. I not very close to it, but I believe it works relatively well. I understand that it is somewhat cumbersome to maintain and we are actually looking to create an in house IVR app to see how that works.

[atrober]

Thx for the info. I'm trying to evaluate the offerings of these different vendors and I really value the feedback of actual users! Can you tell me more about the maintenance issues? We're looking at implementing across several sites so obviously 'ease of support' is an issue. We use both Avaya and Aspect switches, Edify, and home-grown CTI; is your environment similar?

[Andrew Todd]

The company I last worked with had Virtual Hold. It was highly valued by customers. Here's my take on the concept: when you go to a bank at lunch you can visually assess the length of the queue of customers waiting for tellers. You are "empowered" to judge whether what business you want to conduct is both important and urgent enough to warrant waiting in queue for a teller. If you don't have the time (patience) to wait and feel that your task isn't important enough, you can exit the line. The bank's visual queue has allowed you to make decisions about how you want to spend your time. In contact centres, customers do not have the luxury of visualizing the queue depth (length) or time to answer because transactions are conducted by telephone, not a physical queue. Therefore, in order to achieve the same level of empowerment for telephone callers as customers waiting in line at the bank, announcing the expected time to answer and then giving the customer the CHOICE to wait live or be called back in a defined period of time empowers the customers to decide, again, how they wish to spend their time. Virtual Hold is, I'd guess, 80% accurate (we handled hundreds of thousands of calls per month with about 500 agents across 10 branches). All this having been said, there is one very important consideration in deciding which application will best suite your specific needs. Will all customers, regardless of them waiting live or waiting via the call-back feature, be taken in the order of longest waiting customer's call delivered to the longest waiting agent? After the token from the live queue is passed to the call-back queue and because the call-back queue cannot transfer the customer back into the live queue, it is possible that the two queues will have different wait times even though customers are supposed to maintain their order in queue with the Virtual Hold technology. This scenario has more to do with staffing levels and the size of the contact centre in question (that is, the smaller the contact centre the greater the chance that short bursts of calls will throw a wrench into wait times). Hope this has helped your quest for information on Virtual Hold or Call-Back technology.

[hfranco]

Virtual Hold Technology LLC offers a system that prompts the caller to choose between holding and receiving a return call. If the caller chooses a return call, the caller information is automatically taken from the caller, the call is disconnected, and the call is returned at the time the caller would have been served had the caller stayed on hold.

The company's web site is:

www.virtualhold.com

Should you need further assistance, my contact information is:

Hector Franco
408-730-0110
whfranco@attbi.com