The customer customer is so important, why do you have a machine keep you busy while you sort things out with someone else?
Putting customers on hold is about more than people being patient. Hold time shows a disconnect between the customers wanting to work with you and your willingness to want to take advantage of that immediate opportunity to impact a customer for good.
It’s enough to make you wonder if you’re forced to be on hold for a certain amount of time just so these companies can pitch to you as part of their marketing plan! Here’s the truth: nobody likes being put on hold.
This isn’t just about being impatient or having no tolerance; it’s about desiring for the business, to which you’re paying your hard-earned cash, to have a more intuitive and considerate system in place to help you out when you need it.
Your Call is NOT Very Important to Us…
“Please hold for the next available representative.” I bet you know those words all too well. How much do you enjoy listening to cheesy music and being inundated with corny sales pitches while you wait?
Indeed, your call is so important to us that we have a machine keeping you busy while we sort things out with someone else. It’s time to kill the call waiting and start being a bit more thoughtful and intuitive with your phone-based customer service setup.
Maybe you’ve had the good fortune of calling a business and having someone pick up immediately and begin helping you. How did that feel? I bet you were expecting to be put on hold, but you were met with a pleasant surprise when you were assisted promptly and courteously.
It’s not difficult to setup a customer service system that can take calls immediately, answered by a human operator. It’s actually quite simple, but most businesses are so obsessed with cutting costs and automating everything that they end up eliminating the human factor that makes people want to keep coming back!
People today are starving for a great customer experience; so don’t miss this as your opportunity to deliver one.
Changing Things Up – Addressing Hold Time
Proactive customer service from customer account managers can make all the difference in potentially addressing issues before they become a problem and force customers to reach out to you in masses creating excessive hold time.
People have been conditioned to be left on their own to figure things out, and when they don’t they expect to be greeted by the typical automated system. Proactive customer relations is your chance to break the chain.
Customer relations teams can leverage automated campaigns to follow up with customers regarding typical on boarding processes. This can ensure that the right information is being delivered to customers before they actually run into problems.
With decent CRM software and a well-trained customer relations team, with an expert customer service department, you can expand your ability to deliver timely information to your customers and reduce the number of requests to service teams while improving the overall customer experience.
Consider the possibilities, but don’t just think about it – act. Start taking the necessary steps to maximize human interaction with your business, and do everything you can to eliminate the need to put your customers on hold.
