One of the most important factors that affects customer experience, which is of utmost importance for companies, is customer waiting time. In order to achieve a good customer experience, the waiting time needs to be improved. But why is waiting time important and how can it be improved?
Why is Customer Waiting Time Important?
Customers want to reach the service they want as soon as possible. Customers, who cannot reach the service they demand in approximately 14 minutes, usually terminate the call. Customers whose call is not attended to on time, hangs up and abandons the call, negatively affecting customer satisfaction and damaging the brand image. Research on customer waiting time, detected that businesses lose almost %75 of their customers due to waiting time. Therefore, if companies would like to increase their sales and to achieve customer satisfaction, they have to improve their waiting time.
How to Improve Customer Waiting Time?
There are different ways to improve customer waiting time, although it may differ for each company’s customer strategies. Some of these are as follows:
1) Make Use of the Power of Entertainment
One of the most effective factors that bother customers while waiting in the call queue is the inactive waiting time. This situation makes customers feel like they are wasting their time and while the waiting time increases, this feeling also gets stronger. And if what the customer is hearing during this wait is great silence, the situation becomes even more unbearable.
Just as in some offices there are television, music, magazines or newspapers to make sure that the customer is not bored, this can be applied to customers on the phone. In order to turn customer waiting time into a good customer experience, you can make use of short surveys or music to keep the customers active. Thus, the waiting time for customers can turn into better and bearable situations.
2) Trust in IVR Technologies
Interactive Voice Response (IVR), is a telephone system that automatically interacts with callers, gathers information and routes calls to the most appropriate agent. IVR, offering many benefits to businesses, helps improve customer satisfaction by giving rapid responses to customer questions. With the rapid responses of the IVR systems, customer waiting time is decreased and in turn the used time becomes more beneficial.
3) Satisfy with an Effective Call Queuing
Another factor which has a tremendous effect on customer waiting time is call queueing. Queued calls are in line with the rules put forward by the companies, and must be fair in order to meet customer expectations. In call queueing one of the most basic rules is “first one in, first one out”. Accordingly, during the waiting time, customers must be notified about why they have to be waiting and reminded about their call queue. Everything that you do should be about creating a perception that you are doing the best you can to attend to the customer in the queue as soon as possible. During this process, make sure that you have the best call queueing system and that you communicate openly with your customers.
Improve Waiting Time with Infoset
Improving waiting time is critical for customer-centric companies. Sometimes the monitoring and analysis of waiting time improvements might lead to loss of time and money. At this point Infoset optimizes waiting time by offering an advanced call center management with IVR menus, call queueing and flexible call routing. Using the Omni-channel customer service system, you can manage all your support and sales channels and automate all your processes through one platform. Start using Infoset today to take your customer experience to the next level and increase your sales!
