What are some strategies for reducing customer waiting times?

Hi, Lea!

I think the first question I'd like to ask is - why are the agents putting the customer on hold? What are they doing when they put a customer on hold?

Understanding why an agent would put a contact on hold is key to resolving the problem.

If agents routinely put customers on hold because they have to research answers to questions, you could split agents into skill groups, so that agents can specialize in specific sorts of inquiries. You could also evaluate the sorts of questions being asked, compare that to hold times, and quickly identify where the "hold up" is.

If customers are being put on hold because the agent needs permission from someone else (say, a supervisor), you could look at empowering the agents to make those decisions, perhaps by setting up guidelines that specify when they can make those decisions themselves.

If the agents put the customers on hold to handle another call (or contact type), that's clearly a training issue, to some extent, but it is also an issue with regards to priorities for the call center.

If the agent is waiting on a computer to do work, you could look to your IT department to get them to identify why responses are slow. And, work with your agents to have them keep talking to the customer while they are waiting.

In any case, I think one thing you might want to do right away is to institute a "hold timer', so that agents are compelled to go back to a caller every X seconds, check in, and reassure them that their request is being handled.

Note that this is a different question than waiting in queue - the customer has reached an agent, and is now on hold (possibly again).

Russell

Some of the reasons for long wait times are often related to CSRs not handling and resolving calls quickly. I’ve mentioned a couple of reasons and possible solutions to think about:
1. Cause: Do the agents have access to the right information to resolve a call and it’s easily accessible. Solution - a Knowledge Management solution is helpful. Does not have to be a fancy software, could be having organized data posted on an internal website
2. Cause: Agents perhaps don’t know how to find the information quickly enough or not trained well enough to reduce call handle times so that they can reduce queue time for callers. Solution: Training. Quality monitoring will help pin-point issues as well.
3. Cause: Not enough agents to handle calls, skills not staffed appropriately, calls not routed appropriately. Solution: Better workforce management and call routing, options to reduce handle time through use of CTI, etc.
From a customer experience perspective, to ease the annoyance of a caller, options could be:
1. Giving the customer an option of someone calling them back
2. Allowing them to opt out of the queue to perhaps do some IVR transactions while holding their place in queue
3. Telling customers estimated wait times so they know how long they are expected to be on hold for

Further on, wait times can be classified as 2 types. Pre IVR and Post IVR

Pre IVR - This is the wait time that customer encounters when they hit the IVR and traverse through to reach out to an associate. Typically, IVR trees are designed based on the cost to serve. If you look at CSAT over CTS then you would have a flat IVR tree and then the customer would reach the associate relatively quick.

Post IVR - As Sherylann stated, the causes are 3 fold. In addition, you would want to look at CRM response times. Typically homegrown/legacy systems which are not highly scalable suffer from these issues of slow system time causing associates to put customers' on hold

Further, proper telephone etiquette is a must. When you see wait periods of shorter intervals, the associate needs to actively engage with customers

Finally, it also depends on your pricing model. If you are looking at login hour billing, you need to be careful of the hold times. Typically there is a cap in this on login hours or per call minute pricing. Further, your RTA needs to be clued on into login hour tracking and use of aux codes

Hope this helps

The reasons noted above are the most common in terms of lack of training, poor processes, inadequate IT systems, and lack of authority. However, another common reason is just to take a breath. When a center is very busy and agents get call after call, sometimes they just need some time to think and take a breath. When you force calls to the headset and restrict the use of after call work, this is one way agents have to take a rest.

There are quite a few good answers here, and exceptionally relevant! One thing that I can hear through this string of discussion that rings true in any performance related situation is determining what is the cause through a performance evaluation.

A major component to what what my company does is to try to help our Client's to understand that the first thing that needs to be done is an initial performance evaluation to help determine the relation of the expected performance to the actual performance (in your case, there is assumed to be a goal of a certain wait time vs what is actually happening).

It could be that the internal or external expecatations are not being set properly. Or you may have a problem with communication within the organization (the message and importance isn't getting to the right people or perhaps not clearly), or potentially training, or engagement (employees who don't WANT to do the job WON'T). As you can see, there is much more to determining the area for improvement and the reasons behind it.

My suggestion is to begin with taking the time to determine the area for improvement, either through your internal resources or through bringing in an external resource to conduct the process. Until you identify what is the "root cause" of the problem, you may be dealing with "real problems" but it won't solve it all together.

Lea: As Christopher points out, there are many good answers that have been posted. The key in any situation like this is to use data to determine the problem and drive the resolution. You need to find out the root cause or causes by gathering and analyzing the appropriate data and then planning your solution based upon what the data and analysis told you. It pretty much the D-M-A-I-C cycle. Good luck.

Great point Eric! Many times Lean is thought of as something strictly for manufacturing which is FAR from the truth. I utilize it quite often, and find that it can work in just about any situation.

Lea,
There are some good answers posted. I have a slightly different view. (I assume that your agents I properly trained and equipped)

1. There is an acceptable wait time range for customers. for example most callers are willing to wait up to 20 seconds on hold.
2. In order to optimize your wait times, you have to schedule your agents appropriately versus your call volume. In other works there is not need to have 50 agents schedule at 9am if historically you only receive 20 calls. There is a well know process of forecasting call volume and generating optimal (or close to optimal) agent schedules.

If you wanted to find out more I would be glad to share more of my knowledge in that area. In a different life I used to run a software company that generated those forecasts and schedules (also known as workforce management software)

As has been mentioned above, most of the time, your customer waiting times come from 3 things:

1) The system in place (online, or paper instructions) did not effectively answer all of the customer's questions or provide the necessary information the customer needed. Or the service did not work as was originally intended so the customer felt that they needed to contact your company to get information or to resolve a problem.

A Fix: Walk through the process as though you were a customer. Are there ares where you can add more information or clarify current steps to reduce questions from customers? Have other people in the company walk through the process as a customer and have them offer suggestions. ***Have your front line staff in the company walk through the process and offer input or have them share what questions they are being asked the most and find ways to add that information to processes your customers are going through.

2) You'd be surprised how much of the time customers are being placed on hold because the agent can't or isn't allowed to do something for the customer. I'm pretty strict with my team I oversee in making sure that they are empowered to handle customer's issues. Try to give your staff as much authority to handle issues as you can. Think of it, at Walmart, there's a big line of customers waiting to check out, everyone annoyed, and we're all waiting on a manager who usually stands around watching to come over and turn a key on the register to clear something. Really? All that waiting to turn a key? Is there some secret power with turning that key that you can't teach your front line staff to handle that? They're not stupid, just train them and let them take care of problem and stop the bottlenecks in your system.

3) There is not enough staff to adequately handle customer's requests. Even with everything that has been done to provide information to customers, train staff, empower staff to handle customer issues, etc. there will eventually still be a number of customers who will still need to call in to your team. As a manager you'll need to simple bring in more people to help field those customer issues. If you know you've done everything you can to reduce the need for customers to call in, then you should be pretty comfortable with brining in extra staff and are justified in brining in extra staff to handle the call volume.

Although it does not address your question, this comment relates to the satisfaction of someone who is placed on hold.

I visited a collections call center recently and when they have extended hold times, they use a human greeter and then place the caller on hold. This strategy helped them reduce their abandoned call percentage dramatically. The human voice helped them to know there were people to help them and they were then willing to wait.