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……..

100MB, 10GB, 2 TB? Where Does It End?

 

Bandwidth, speed, RAM, CPU’s, storage, backup, video, mobile, wireless…..bluetooth……crazy isn’t it?

We have evolved so quickly with our technology that the communications industry is in full acceleration mode.  A mere 20 years or so ago, dial-up internet was being born.  The US Postal Service was delivering free disks to us offering programs like “150 Hours Free” of dial-up internet from companies like Delphi, AOL, Prodigy, Earthlink, Ziplink, UUNET, NetZero, and Juno. 

Only a few years ago, DSL was the new trend for businesses and homeowners.  DSL provided a major upgrade over the 9600 “Baud” or “Bd” available on dial-up modems.  DSL is still available today and can reach speeds of 7MB or faster.

To jump forward, T1.5, DS-3, OC1, OC3, coax, FIOS, fiber, Ethernet over copper “EoC”, and Ethernet over Coax provide loads of bandwidth options in today’s market.  The need for bandwidth is growing so quickly, cellular technology, once thought of as the answer to our needs, is having a hard time keeping up.  With the onset of 3G, 4G, now 5G devices, cell network providers are struggling to meeting the needs of cellular users.  Many cell providers are currently deploying “hot-spots” where they provide a land based bandwidth option to off load some of the traffic on their cellular network.  

Remember these types of ads?

To utilize all this bandwidth come new devices.  No longer do we buy the “10MB computer for $5999”.  Now we have laptops with 1TB hard drives and 5GB of RAM, tablets, smartphones, iPads, iTouchs, Droids, Kindles, and even desktops.

While the improvement in peripheral equipment has been incredible, this has led to a need for even more powerful back office processing…..namely the onset of the “Cloud” technology.  The advantage of the “Cloud provides IT departments the capability to maintain enterprise level processing equipment with little or no CAPEX expenses.  The Cloud providers are in the business of providing state-of-the art equipment and security to private companies. With the click of a mouse, a company's IT Director can increase servers, add RAM, double storage space and many more conveniences.

Today’s cloud providers maintain secure, state-of-the-art data centers across the United States and provide inherent redundancy for your data.  It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the advances in technology and bandwidth today.  For a private company, technology is quickly passing by the capabilities of the average IT staff.  The cost of constantly upgrading in-house equipment, increasing bandwidth, staffing, security, power, backup, etc is heading beyond the reasonable expectations for any company but those in the Fortune 100. 

So where are we heading?  I’m guessing we’ve all got some great ideas and some good speculation?  I’d enjoying hearing your thought and having my readers participate in the discussion…..any comments, thoughts?

If you’re looking for direction or advice on your networking or processing needs, please drop me an email at dave@davehanron.com or reach out to me via Twitter @DaveHanron and I’ll be happy to help.

100 mbps Residential Internet vs 100 mbps Business Internet..Why the Price Difference?

“Why can I pay ~$115.95 at home for 100Mbps internet download speed but 100Mbps download speed for my business is $2800 or more per month?”

This is a great question and becoming more and more popular as people look for high speed internet access.  Let’s take a look at the reasons behind it.

A view of a typical 100-500 mbps fiber cable

In residential areas, there are multiple families on a single street or in a specific block.   The local carriers will typically install a large capacity “pipe” or cable into a central location in a neighborhood and then divide the bandwidth amongst their clients.  The large capacity cable will usually be in the 500Mbps range.  The 500Mbps pipe would cost the carriers ~$4,000 in monthly expenses to install and maintain at a reasonable profit level.  (Remember, the carriers are in business to make money.)

Before we go any further, it’s important to understand the difference between “asynchronous” and “synchronous” transmission capabilities.  Synchronous transmission refers to communications where the sending and receiving speeds are exactly the same.  Asynchronous transmission has different speeds on the sending (uploading) and receiving (downloading) ends.  This is the key to understanding the costs differences we are discussing.

Now that we understand the difference between “Synchronous” and “Asynchronous” let’s continue.  At your home you may select an internet plan with “Up to 20/5 download upload speeds”.  Now exactly what does this mean?  First, understand you are NOT getting a direct link to the carrier, rather you are on a type of shared service.  The carrier will split off a portion of the large capacity pipe going down your street and put a “drop” (the drop is the connection from the pole to your home) in to give you internet access.  If you read the fine print, it will say “speeds not guaranteed”.  They can’t guarantee speeds on this type of service because they are dependent on how many users are simultaneously using the pipe in your neighborhood.   You can almost always see the difference in performance at 3:00 pm vs. late night or early morning.  Why?  Because schools get out at this time and the students are all doing their homework, using the internet.  You MIGHT get the 20mbps download and 5 upload speed at 3am when you’re the only one in the neighborhood using it, but I doubt it.   Some carriers are even offering businesses 100 mbps download, 10 mbps upload for under $500 per month.  Not guaranteed speed, but it sure sounds good.  I wouldn't want my business with 15 or more reps running applications using it though.  You'd better have a good backup program for them.  They'll have plenty of spare time waiting for the screens to move.

You can check the actual speed of you connection for free at www.speedtest.net.  Here’s the one from my home connection at 3pm on Saturday……

The carriers will also provide a residential type router (they're not very expensive, which is why the carriers are willing to send you a replacement whenever you report trouble).  How many times have you called to report a problem, only to be told to “Unplug the router for 30 seconds, then plug it back in?”.  If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to usually have to wait to have a replacement router mailed to you.

Now let’s look at your business.  With true “Business Class” a carrier dedicates a single large capacity “pipe” to one customer and will guarantee the 100mbps/100mbps speeds. (Don’t get fooled by false claims from sales people about their service being “Business Class”.  Remember asynchronous vs synchronous.  If the carrier is quoting you 100mbps/10mbps speeds, this is merely residential service masked as business class.  True business class has synchronous speeds.)    Business class service comes with a business class router which is capable of being troubleshot remotely and will rarely fail.  These routers are substantially more expensive and far more functional than the ones you get at home.

If you want a great question for the sales rep pushing business internet at 100mbps/10mbps speeds, ask them what their guaranteed MTTR is? That's "Mean Time To Repair" should you ever experience a outage.  I'd love to hear what you think of their answer?  True Business Class internet access should have a MTTR of no more than 6 hours before credits are issued.

Finally, let’s look at the pricing.  On residential service, the large capacity pipe (in this example let’s assume 500mbps) is broken down for multiple residents use.  At 20/5 speeds, with only lower speeds guaranteed (remember the fine print), they can put up to 100 customers on one pipe.  100 customers @~$115 per month equals $11,500 in access fees.  This leaves the carrier with a tidy profit.

The true Business Class pipe is typically priced in the $4,000 (based on bandwidth & distance to the central office) range per month, equaling the price we talked about earlier to provide the 500mbps capacity and maintain a reasonable profit level in the residential neighborhood.

There are certainly other factors that go into the access costs and reasons behind it but we’ve touched on the high points.  As many carriers have exited the small to medium size business markets and no longer maintain a field sales staff due to profitablility issues, be cautious when working with a field sales rep offering "Asynchronous" service as "Business Class".  It's true, it comes at a lower price, but you get what you pay for.

If you need additional info or have questions, please let me know in comments and I will try and address them.  If you want to contact me directly to discuss the options you may have for internet and/or cloud access for your business, please complete my “For more information” form or email me at Dave@davehanron.com