Quality wines. That term can mean a different thing to different people. Some folks may consider a sub-$100 bottle of wine as not being a quality bottle. Some people may consider quality to be simply something they can drink easily without wanting to wretch at the flavour. One thing is almost an absolute though when it comes to wine: They get better with age. Callers who are waiting in your IVR queues, however, are the exact opposite.
Let’s hit a few major issues about why callers get increasingly agitated while being stuck in your inbound queues.
- Inadequate staffing – This is a common problem that should be fairly easily solved. You expect to average 100 calls every 30 minutes with each call averaging about 10 minutes in length? Don’t have 10 agents available. Assuming some of these callers are calling in to register a complaint, if they do stay on the line, they are going to become increasingly irritated. That’s not a great scenario for your agents, who are already working flat-out due to your poor staffing schedule. If you have resources in some of your other less busy queues, use the Q-Suite‘s Live Queue assignment feature to ease the load on your busiest agents.
- Wait it out or abandon – The last thing callers really want to have happen when they call into an inbound contact center ACD is to abandon their call. While waiting for a longer than expected amount of time is also frustrating, most of the time callers want to have their call connected. Sometimes people may only have a set amount of time that they can wait. If the wait time extends past that time period, the caller has no choice but to abandon, which is a complete waste of time for a caller. Give your callers options to exit out of the queue if the wait times are too large. Combine a periodic queue message with a DTMF option with an exit that sends the caller to a voicemail box or allows them to leave a callback number.
- Atrocious music on hold – It’s completely understandable that you cannot please everyone with music. Mozart and Bach may be the most soothing on hold score for some people, while others would want to claw their eyes out. It’s a tough balance, but having music on hold that is ‘ok’ is highly desirable over music that might be deemed as ‘downright awful.’ You may also want to splice in some periodic messages that explain how to do some of your services via the website or perhaps a message about a promotion that a caller may find interesting. If a caller is in good spirits when they call in, horribly chosen music on hold can sour that experience very quickly.
Inbound contact center ACD callers have neither the time nor the patience to gleefully sit in a queue for extended periods of time, unlike that nice bottle of wine in a perfectly temperature controlled cellar. Don’t keep your agents on the shelf for too long or you may find out that you’ve got a lot of corked customers (that’s a very bad thing, as far as wine goes).