How Long Should You Wait on Hold?

How Long Should You Wait on Hold?

I hear the comments every day…..”You won’t believe what happened to me yesterday!”   …. “I waited almost 40 minutes to get through” ….”You’d think they’d hire more people to answer the phones”….” I can’t believe I waited that long only to get transferred”…”That’s the last time. I’m moving my business”.....… and so on.

Hold times can last up to 13 minutes

 

Granted, working in the communications industry, I might be exposed to more of the complaints than the average worker but it is certainly a sore spot when someone has a poor experience with a company’s customer service organization.

We’ve all made that dreaded call during our lunch hour to try and ask a question about something, maybe your cell phone, your cable bill, insurance bill, or even in the worst cases, the calls to file for unemployment benefits or Cobra insurance coverage.  I personally have had loads of these experiences, with some hold times exceeding an hour.  And that is FRUSTRATING.

Take a look at a couple of these examples of hold times from CBC News…..

      1.   Continental Airlines, 13 minutes
2. Air Canada, 10 minutes
3. IRS (Personal), 9 minutes
4. Amtrak, 9 minutes
5. AT&T Customer Service (General), 8 minutes
6. Delta Air Lines, 7 minutes
7. Southwest Airlines, 7 minutes
8. JetBlue Airways, 6 minutes
9. ACE Hardware, 6 minutes
10. AARP Healthcare, 5 minutes

Shocking, huh?  Not really.  I actually would argue that the time to get a resolution is actually longer.  How many times do you get transferred and put back into the queue?  Something to think about?

We each have tolerances in our business in order to balance operating costs with customer satisfaction.  The discussion here is what level of hold time are you willing to accept before you start losing customers?  And as hold time goes up, you WILL LOSE customers.  That’s a fact.

I have seen many statistics pop up over the years to measure hold time. “ATA” or “Average Time of Answer”, “AHT” or “Average Hold Time”, “TIQ” or “Time in Queue” are just a few that come to mind.  I actually use this statistic as a major selling point.  My feeling is providing a service with little or no hold time presents a professional solution and portrays a service orientated company.  If the operations of a firm are designed around short hold times, it means the company cares about its customers and will go to any means necessary to deliver a first class customer experience.  This is the type of company where I want my business to go.

Where do you put your business and why?  Do you think hold time affects customer retention rates?  Let’s find out what we all think…….

…….And just for the record, my company, Granite Telecommunications, answers all  customer service calls with a live person on average in less than 8 seconds 24x7x365……..

Copper Phone Lines – End of the Road or Just the Beginning?

As the Bell companies continue to migrate their service focus away from their legacy copper networks, pushing new technologies like FIOS, Ethernet, fiber, satellite, and wireless, are businesses witnessing the end of an era?

Copper lines are in every neighborhood

Copper phone lines have been around since the invention of the telephone in the late 1800’s.  Alexander Graham Bell is credited with designing the first electromagnetic  telephone in 1876.  Copper lines have been in use ever since.  The number of copper lines in the United States peaked at 186 million in 2000.  Since then, more than 100 million lines have been replaced with newer technologies.

Today, the legacy copper network is expensive for the incumbent local carriers to maintain, and they continue to move resources out of the copper network and into the new transport methods.  The copper wire gets wet during storms and corrodes, causing outages and requiring constant repairs.  But what happens to us, the consumer, who has relied on “copper” to form the backbone of our national communications networks for the last 130 years?

Manholes can be a disaster for a repair tech

The decision by the bell companies to reduce their support structure for their legacy networks has opened a door of opportunity for a few wholesalers to enter the market and offer consolidated billing services, discounted rates, and an exceptional customer experience.  While it’s common to hit an IVR platform, and be placed in a call queue for up to 20 minutes when calling your local phone companies, using a wholesaler can deliver calls answered by a live person, within as little as 8 seconds, 24x7x365.

Another benefit delivered by these wholesale providers is the ability to consolidate billing across traditional company boundaries.  If you own a 

multi-location business, and have offices in Verizon territory in the northeast, locations in AT&T’s footprint in the south, and others in Centurylink’s territory in the northwest,  you now have the capability to combine all these locations on to a single invoice, with a single point of contact for all your moves, adds, changes, new installs, billing questions, etc.  The service comes with an online web portal, providing your business with unmatched visibility to your services, circuit inventories, repair tickets, adds, changes, and installs.

As the wholesalers work through agreements with the various bell operating companies, switching your services to one of their platforms is as simple as signing a “Letter of Authorization” or “LOA”, and having an electronic transfer occur.  The lines physically remain on the Bell network, with only the customer service and billing functions being moved.

The best part of all is because of the massive buying volumes the wholesalers bring to the market, among all these benefits comes the best one of all, a reduction in price of up to 30% off tariffed rates.

If you are interested in learning how to take advantage of a wholesale arrangement for your business, please reach out to me @davehanron on Twitter or email me at dave@davehanron.com and I’ll be happy to assist you.