| Image caption goes here AI-powered virtual assistant interacting with a customer
How long are you willing to wait on hold for? Five minutes? 30 minutes? More than an hour? We are all familiar with the hold time ‘jingle’ that at some point we find ourselves humming along to. Not to mention the mini heart attack felt when the music stops, we anticipate a welcoming human voice, only to be met with ‘your call is important to us…’ and the tune starts again.
As a customer, at what point do we turn around and say ‘this isn’t good enough!’ and hang up? Your question remains unanswered and you’re left with a bad taste in your mouth towards the brand that has let down your customer service expectations. Ultimately, you’ve just had a bad customer experience (CX).
In this instance, you are just one customer. While one bad customer experience isn’t enough to completely ruin a brand’s image, how can you know that other customers aren’t experiencing the same? If your organisation started earning a reputation for lengthy customer hold times, that’s when alarm bells would ring and by then, the damage is done.
In this blog, we discuss how hold times affect your customer experiences and the ways in which you can optimise your contact centre operations to minimise caller frustrations.
Average hold time (AHT) is a crucial metric in contact centre operations that reflects the duration a customer spends on hold before speaking to an agent. Long hold times can frustrate customers and harm your brand's reputation. In contrast, a low AHT indicates efficient service, enhancing customer satisfaction.
To optimise AHT, it's essential to analyse call patterns, implement robust training programs for agents and leverage advanced technologies like AI and automation. By doing so, you can ensure quick, effective responses, keeping your customers happy and loyal.
An acceptable contact centre hold time varies depending on industry standards and customer expectations. Generally, customers expect hold times to be no longer than two to three minutes. Exceeding this duration can lead to frustration and a negative perception of your brand.
To maintain acceptable hold times, it's crucial to monitor call volume trends, ensure adequate staffing and continuously train your agents for efficiency. Implementing technology solutions like interactive voice response (IVR) systems and chatbots can also help manage high call volumes, reducing the pressure on human agents and keeping hold times within acceptable limits.
Remember, minimising hold time is not just about speed but also about maintaining the quality of service. Strive for a balance where your customers feel valued and heard, even if it means a slightly longer wait for a thorough resolution.
Calculating the average hold time (AHT) in a contact centre is essential for understanding and improving customer experience. The formula is straightforward:
Regularly monitoring and analysing AHT helps identify patterns and areas for improvement. By optimising staffing levels, enhancing agent training and leveraging technology, you can reduce AHT, leading to a more efficient contact centre and higher customer satisfaction.
Average hold time (AHT) is more than just a metric; it's a vital indicator of your contact centre's efficiency and a key driver of customer satisfaction. Understanding its significance can help you enhance service quality and overall business performance.
Long hold times can lead to frustrated customers, negatively impacting their experience and perception of your brand. On the other hand, shorter hold times typically result in happier customers, boosting loyalty and retention.
AHT provides insights into your contact centre's operational efficiency. High AHT may indicate issues such as insufficient staffing, inadequate training or inefficient processes. Addressing these can streamline operations and improve productivity.
Reducing AHT can also lead to cost savings. Efficient call handling means your agents can manage more calls in less time, reducing the need for additional staff and minimising operational costs.
In a competitive market, superior customer service can set your business apart. Maintaining a low AHT shows that you value your customers' time, enhancing your reputation and giving you an edge over competitors.
By regularly monitoring and optimising AHT, you can ensure a balanced approach that keeps your customers satisfied, your operations smooth and your business thriving.
Long hold times in a contact centre can be frustrating for customers and detrimental to business performance. Several factors can contribute to extended hold times:
These are the facts: the average person spends ten to 20 minutes per week on hold; 13 hours per year and around 43 days per lifetime1. With more than 80% of customers being put on hold every time they contact a business, if your organisation was to implement the following initiatives to lower hold times, your customer experience would be ahead of your competitors.
It’s important that your agents understand how to handle frustrated customers who may have been on hold for a long period, but ultimately just want their answer quickly and efficiently. Ensure they understand how to calmly address the customer’s pain point while keeping them abreast as to why the hold time is high and what is being done to minimise the remaining time it takes to get them the information they need. This can drastically improve brand reputation as while only 35% of customers share negative feedback online, 53% share positive comments instead4.
Self-service options can be anything from FAQs, a customer knowledge base, customer support articles, chatbots, virtual agents, web forms, or any digital service that allows customers the ability to find the answers they want on their own. By just implementing virtual customer assistants, organisations saw a 70% reduction in call, chat and/or email enquiries7.
In order to incorporate this into your contact centre, investing in interactive voice response (IVR) systems is a great place to start. These platforms already have this function built into their service offering. A traditional IVR setup requires callers to select from fixed push button menus; ‘press 1 to be directed to sales, press 2 to be directed to customer service…’ and so on.
The ‘next-level’ approach, also known as customer experience platforms, can create call flows that lead to the best outcome using technology that accurately identifies caller intent from natural language responses. This means the platform can gather data from all over the contact centre and understand if the best practice would be to offer a caller a callback or virtual hold to minimise the chances of increasing hold times.
Customers expect a seamless and positive experience when they interact with your business, even when you’re dealing with seasonal peaks or global economic fallouts. In this case study, you will learn how utilising artificial intelligence and complex call routing solutions helped a leading Australian retailer achieve a reduction of up to 30 seconds on their average call handling time.