Why Long Hold Times Drastically Affect Your Brand Reputation

Did you know that the average person waits almost 43 days in their entire lifetime on hold! In fact, 86% of people are put on hold every time they contact a business. Ever wonder what that does to your brand perception? Clearly customers aren’t satisfied and before the days of social media, they would just rant to friends and family. Ohhhh how things have changed.

Word of mouth was bad then, but it’s completely viral now. According to Forrester, 19% of consumers who had unsatisfactory service interactions shared their experiences through social networks in 2010, a 50% increase over 2009.

I referenced onholdwith.com to further investigate hold times. Not only does this data display the large amount of people waiting on hold, it also reveals how many of them resorted to Twitter to complain. This chart shows the worst offenders in hold time for the first two weeks of July 2013.

This is a clear representation of how one channel (voice) is rolling into another (social). For more data on the worst hold-time offenders, check out our annual list here.

The world-class brands will know how to better this experience. Firstly, avoid hold times in the call center. Call-back technology is one way of achieving that goal.

Secondly, find a way to seamless transition customers from the social channel back to the voice channel. If customers started with voice, chances are they had a more complicated problem to solve that required live assistance. However, perhaps they were an abandoned call who resorted to social media to complain. Fact is, 35% of all non-voice channel inquiries eventually escalate to voice. Using Web Rescue, Fonolo’s web call-back solution, chat agents could simply retrieve the customer’s information from a private message using social media and have an agent call the customer back.

This would enhance the customer experience and improve customer perceptions of your brand!

About onholdwith.com

This site provides consumers with a platform to post and discuss their aggravations. It catalogs and publishes tweets from people waiting on hold and alerts the offending company – ultimately giving consumers a voice. We’re hoping the pressure will motivate companies to take necessary steps that will improve the call center experience.