Category Archives: Call Center

Why are your customers still waiting on hold?

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Waiting on hold is consistently one of the top complaints about phone-based customer service. One way to eliminate hold time is to hire enough agents that one is always available. Of course, this is cost prohibitive for most companies! Another way is to implement a virtual queuing (VQ) solution. Shai has written a great series of posts on our VQ offering, Hold-for-Me, on his blog. See, for example:

There are some great cost-savings arguments that support the case for VQ. (I’ve been spending a lot of time working through these scenarios with prospective customers.) But I believe the best case for it is the uplift in customer satisfaction. In today’s hyper-connected world, delivering a superior experience to your customer is something that echoes quickly and has long-lasting impact. I just came across this quote that sums it up nicely:

… a sore neck and a sweaty ear do not a happy customer make.

– Jessica Sebor, Mar 2010, The 2010 CRM Service Awards.

eBay scolded for long hold times

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Time Magazine took eBay to task last week for long hold times, and other matters, complaining that eBay had disconnected some of its toll-free lines. The auction giant has recently made an effort to offload call volume to a live chat offering, seeking to lower costs. Although the company promised that wait times for a chat session would be “under five minutes”, the reporter recounted a much different experience:

[I] tried the online chat on three different occasions on three different days with delays of one to four hours to reach a rep.… I had time to cook dinner, eat it, do the dishes, vacuum my apartment and rifle through TV channels — only to find I was still number 30-something in the slow-moving online queue.

Reversing course?

On the phone front, Chad O’Meara, vice president of global customer service, admitted that “low volume buyers and sellers do not currently receive telephone support” except for a few site categories. But it looks like they’re reversing course on this thing. O’Meara then said that they plans to ramp up the call center with additional agents offer phone service to all customers by the end of 2011.

A lesson to be learned

What’s the lesson? There is no substitute for a live conversation with a real person. Yes, it is expensive. For a company built on the low-cost platform of online self-serve, I’m sure it’s painful to look at the costs of phone support. But ultimately, that’s the way to earn and keep high-value customers.

Luckily, there are other ways to cut down on the costs of call center operations.

  1. Give people a way to connect directly to the type of agent they need and skip the phone menus. Avoid “zero-outs” and other misnavigation that makes it frustrating for callers and more expensive for the call center.
  2. Collect what information you can before the call and pass that on to the agent. Nothing lowers costs faster than reducing the time an agent spends on a call.
  3. Make the experience as pleasant as possible – virtual queuing and post-call surveys are a great way to do that. Happy callers lead to quick calls. Plenty of data backs that up.

The good news is that Fonolo can do this for eBay or your company, and it doesn’t take much to set up.

Read the full story here: On Hold at eBay: Customer Service Lines Go Dead

Recent press coverage over the virtual queuing debate

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As a follow up to my last post on virtual queuing, here is some coverage on the topic from the last month…

Focus.com

One of the biggest challenges facing any contact center is minimizing the hold time for callers… Sirius Satellite Radio wants to be as customer-friendly as possible to attract new subscribers … If you visit their Contact Us page, you’ll notice a text box [saying] “Don’t wait on hold. Select an option below, enter your phone number and we’ll call you back.” … The company providing this capability is Fonolo, a Toronto-based startup…Virtual queuing really is win-win technology, as it makes contact centers more productive and effective, and it addresses a major shortcoming of the end user experience.

Read full article here.

InsideCTI

It’s a world of cloud computing, Web 2.0, and smartphones. Savvy entrepreneurs are looking at Virtual Queuing in a different light and making it sexy again. VHT, LucyPhone, and Fonolo all aim to improve the customer service experience, but there is clearly a distinction. I believe it is this: Is the solution right in front of the user? If not then I’m afraid it’s part of the problem, especially in a today’s world where user experience is being transformed.

Read full article here.

Excitement brewing over virtual queuing

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Fonolo is best known for inventing “Deep Dialing” which eliminates the frustrations of navigating phone menus. This year, we added “Hold for Me” which eliminates the frustration of waiting on hold. The two features complement each other beautifully.

With Hold for Me, hold-time is replaced with a call-back when the next agent is available. The general industry term for this concept is “virtual queuing” and it has been greatly desired by both consumers and companies for decades. Although other companies have virtual queuing solutions, Fonolo’s approach is unique and disruptive because it does not require any equipment to be added to the call center itself.

If you’d like to learn more I wrote a series of blog posts on the topic:

Providing a pleasant calling experience helps your bottom line

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I’ve spent a lot of time working with customers on the business case for Fonolo deployments and the core issue in every business case is ROI. I always talk about two aspects to the ROI. The first is a quantitative argument that revolves around how we can reduce the operational costs of the call center and increase the success rate of revenue-bearing transactions. These are the “hard numbers” that Accounting needs to see.

The second is a qualitative argument that revolves around making customers happy (or less unhappy) with their calling experience. Everyone implicitly knows that having happy customers is good for business, but it is always difficult to map this to hard numbers.

One way to help connect the dots are industry surveys. The AmEx study that just came out is a great example of that. After asking a random sample of 1000 people (18 or older), they found that:

  • 81% have decided never to do business with a company again because of poor customer service in the past.
  • 50% reported it takes only two poor service experiences before they stop doing business with a company.
  • On average, Americans were willing to spend 9% more with companies that provide excellent service (7% for Canadians)

Read more about that here.  The AmEx study confirms what we all already know: It pays to treat your customers well.

It’s great that there is a growing body of evidence that investments in customer service give solid returns to the bottom line. Makes my job easier!

Case study shows the difficulty of defeating misnavigation

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One of the negative outcomes of phone menus (or IVR systems) is frequent misnavigation, which is the industry term for a caller getting connected to the wrong agent.

Phone menus cause “entrapping”

On the CustomerManagementIQ blog, call center consultant Tripp Babbit recently posted “Hate the Game, Not the Player: IVR vs. the Customer” where he recounted an IVR project he was involved in.

The IVR company had a simple solution, “let’s route problem calls to the right person,” and off they went… Funny thing … 41% of the [calls] got misrouted or had to get transferred… The problem here is that contact centers typically have a variety of demands, and IVR’s become entrapping technology that can’t absorb the variety customers bring.

As we’ve been talking to companies, we’ve heard variations on this story many times. The misnavigation rate Babbit mentions (41%) is right in line with what we hear. In fact, we’ve heard of rates as high as 50%.

Callers hate phone menus

Misnavigation costs money by wasting agent time. But it also increases caller frustration —  the general dislike for phone menus is well documented. Babbit phrases it bluntly:

…call me indifferent with regards to the IVR. Customers, on the other hand, ‘hate’ them.

Narcissistic companies believe they are saving money when they deploy these modern marvels.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Anything that separates a customer from getting an answer quickly and accurately is an annoyance.  Furthermore, it adds to costs and loses customers.”

Hiding your agents to save money is a dead-end

As more and more such case studies and surveys come to light, it is becoming clear that the IVR as a “call-avoidance” tactic is not a smart in the long-term. Yes, it is expensive to have agents on the phone. But it is also expensive to lose customers. The better way to reduce cost is to make agents as efficient as possible. We think Fonolo’s set of features is a great way to do this.

For the call center, social media cuts both ways

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First let me say, since this is my first blog post, that I’m thrilled to be a part of the Fonolo team! After just a few weeks of talking to customers, one thing that has really jumped out at me is the excitement about the impact of social media (which generally means Twitter & Facebook). These tools allow awareness of your customer service quality to propagate quickly through a community or the public at large. On the plus side, the benefits of providing good service can be felt more quickly and more strongly. On the downside, stories of bad service propagate even more quickly.

Leverage for sharing experiences

To get some numerical perspective, check out this recent Customer Experience Report. It explains why small decreases in customers satisfaction can have a bigger impact than you’d expect. Some quotes from that report:

  • Customer service is still the number one reason consumers recommend an organization, more than products or price.
  • Word of mouth is the number one influence on consumers’ purchasing decisions (76 percent), followed by customer reviews and online feedback at 49 percent.
  • 79 percent of consumers that have had a negative experience with an organization told others about it, and 97 percent chose to share their experience via word of mouth.
  • 85 percent wanted to warn others about the pitfalls of doing business with that company and 66 percent wanted to discourage others from buying from that company.

Don’t give people an easy target for complaints

The bottom line here is that you need to be doing everything you can to fill the social media echo chamber with good echoes, not bad. Don’t give people an easy target for complaints!

Bad phone menus and long hold times are two such easy targets. The good news is they are easy to fix. Fonolo’s visual navigation and virtual queuing services can turn those bad echoes into good echoes with no changes to your call center and minimal expense.

Misnavigation is a hidden cost in nearly every call center

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What is misnavigation?

The central function of an IVR system is to connect the caller to the right agent type (e.g. billing vs. sales) or to divert the caller to a self-serve system.  The navigation stage of the call succeeds if the caller connects to the right agent for his issue. It fails if the caller misunderstands the instructions, or loses patience and “zeros out”. This “misnavigation rate” is a metric closely watched by managers of call centers and can be surprisingly high. Based on conversations with various companies, rates are typically around 30% and can go as high as 50%.

The cost

You can calculate how much misnavigation is adding to the cost of your call center. You need to get: 1) Your misnavigation rate, 2) Average time it takes for an agent to handle an internal transfer 3) Average cost of agent time. This figure will then help you put it all together:

The impact of misnavigation

AmEx study confirms what we all already know: It pays to treat your customers well

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American Express released a terrific study last week called the Global Customer Service Barometer.

The goal was “exploring attitudes and preferences toward customer service” in the US and 11 other countries and their results, while not surprising, are still comforting to see for those of us adamant about improving the call center experience.

The results that grabbed headlines were “Americans Will Spend 9% More With Companies That Provide Excellent Service.” (It’s 7% for Canadians, if you were wondering.)

The impact of social media

My favorite part was about the impact of social media:

Nearly half of consumers report always or often using an online posting or blog to get others’ opinions about a company’s customer service reputation. But when consumers go online they’re looking for “watch outs,” saying they put greater credence in negative reviews on blogs and social networking sites than on positive ones (57% and 48%, respectively).

The tendency to weigh negative stories more than positive ones is a well-known effect in psychology. It’s neat to see it quantified in this study.

Swift punishment

It appears from the study that American’s are swift with their punishment for bad service: “81% have decided never to do business with a company again because of poor customer service in the past. When asked how many poor experiences they allow, half of all Americans (50%) reported it takes two poor service experiences before they stop doing business with a company.”

Speech-recognition is not making phone menus any better

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The use of speech recognition in phone menus is one of those advances in technology that sounds great in theory, but doesn’t live up to the promise in the real world. (Maybe it’s because it works so well in the movies!)

There are certainly use cases where  speech recognition is the absolute best approach. Directory assistance is a great example. But, sadly, a far more common implementation involves replacing “press 1 for billing” with “for billing say ‘billing’.” This kind of borderline-comical situation is what leads to so much user dissatisfaction with the technology.

Blogger Blake Landau summed up nicely in a recent post on the CustomerManagementIQ blog:

It’s not a rare day that I hear someone walking in the street on the phone with customer service… screaming into their phone: ‘AGENT, AGENT,AGENT!’ Fortunately the recipient of this anger is not getting their feelings hurt… it’s an automated attendant at the other end of the line. … as consumers, we come to begrudgingly accept these as a fact of life.

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