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Containment rate is a well-established performance metric in the customer service world, but not as well-known as NPS or hold time. I would say it’s on the “wonkish” side as far as metrics go.
So, you can imagine my delight to see “containment rate” mentioned in a New York Times Op-Ed last week! Not surprisingly, it was in the context of a “robots-will-take-our-jobs” thesis, but it at least was a more nuanced approach than what we usually see in the mainstream press.
It’s no secret to the savvy traveller that most leading airlines will limit the amount of empty seats to help boost profits. The problem is, when flights get overbooked paid passengers have to be “accommodated” to give up their seat, or in Delta’s case, it makes it difficult to rebook passengers whose flights have been cancelled. The airline industry is certainly getting its share of bad press lately. Although, unlike the abomination of an innocent bystander being ripped from a United Airlines flight, at least Delta has good reason for its negative publicity.
Last week, Atlanta was hit with severe thunderstorms, flash floods, and hail resulting in a logistical nightmare for Delta Airlines. The storm came crashing in on Wednesday, but the cancellation of flights trickled into Friday, and by the end of the week 3,000 flights had been cancelled!
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So, you’re working on auto-pilot eh? (Yes, I’m Canadian.) I get it; we all tend to get comfortable with the rhythm of our day-to-day tasks and fail to watch areas that may require change. Unfortunately, your repetitive actions will produce the same results. If you keep practicing the same strategies without considering change it will only end in the demise of your center.
The best way of deciding how to improve contact center performance is to step back and look at it from a 360-degree view. After all, innovations and consumer behaviors evolve in scope and sophistication, so it’s worth reconsidering your tactics to potentially take your service to the next level. Continue reading
When callers are waiting on hold they’ll typically hear a range of messages from the contact center’s IVR. Some centers tell callers an estimated wait time, others will announce how many people are in line in front of the caller, but most call centers tell callers nothing other than, “your call is important to us”. (A phrase callers have learned to loathe.) To get a sense of how much anger consumers feel towards hold time, just check out OnHoldwith.com for a real time feed of “tweet venting”.
Given how much frustration is caused by leaving callers on hold, you would think companies would do anything they can to minimize the pain. People often say the worst part about waiting is not knowing how long it will be. So why don’t call centers offer that info?
NOTE: This post originally appeared as an answer on Quora to this question.
This week we present a new installment in our “Pitfalls” series which looks at common mistakes made when measuring or interpreting contact center metrics.
An abandoned call is one where the caller hangs up before reaching an agent. “Abandonment rate” is the fraction of all calls that are abandoned and is one of the most commonly used call center metrics. Its popularity comes from being simple to calculate and easy to understand. Furthermore, high abandonment is a symptom that is easy to correlate with a root cause: long hold times. (With most other metrics, it is not so straightforward to connect cause with effect.)
There are, however, a number of nuances in calculating abandoned rate. Ignoring the five pitfalls below could leave you with a misleading result. Continue reading
72% of customers who make a complaint on Twitter expect the company to respond within one hour. But many of those customers are not using social media as their primary channel of communication. In fact, these complaints are a direct result of the phone channel and customers being kept on hold for too long.
OnHoldWith.com has aggregated those complaints and uncovered the top 10 worst hold-time offenders to start the year. In naming these #onholdwith fails, we’re also serving up the twitter rants that had us laughing, crying, or down-right enraged.
Let’s start at number ten and work our way down to the company who received the most #OnHoldWith complaints: Continue reading
Let’s get straight to the point – If you want a successful contact center, excellent customer service must be at the heart of it. An abandoned call is just the opposite of that. Whether customers are staring at their watches in a checkout line or tapping their fingers while on hold, the time they spend waiting diminishes the experience. Period.
Customers expect to receive service quickly and efficiently. It’s no secret that they hate waiting on hold, which is why they choose to hang-up instead. I’m certain you’re asking the question: Couldn’t they have stuck it out just a little longer to get the answer they needed? The answer is no. 60% of customers will abandon a call after just one minute of waiting on hold. The world is moving at a rapid pace and your contact center needs to keep up. (Don’t worry, I won’t be pointing the finger throughout the entire blog, I actually have a solution for you – yay!)
Who doesn’t love being on hold? The hours wasted, the subtle reinforcement that perhaps your call isn’t important and, of course, the glorious hold music. A truly captivating experience.
What’s not to love about hold music? Take your least favourite smooth jazz, top 40, or Chipmunks medley, then compress and downsample it to 8 kHz and a low bit rate optimized for voice transport (meaning the highs & lows are filtered out), and you get an experience akin to listening to Kenny G, Katy Perry, or Alvin, Theodore & Simon inside a cardboard box. Of course things pick up during the holiday season (‘Mariah Carey season’, as I like to call it), when companies let loose with the music a little.
It’s been said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, something that’s eternally true in the call center. The challenge is how to give every caller the attention they deserve, while avoiding the obvious pitfalls that turn them off.
Here are 5 rookie mistakes you might be making on support calls, and what you can do about them: Continue reading
If there’s one thing most of us hate, it’s waiting on hold.
After all, who would consciously choose to waste their time with a phone receiver stuck to one ear, all the while listening to someone repeat the soothing phrase, “… your call is important to us …”? (The answer, of course, is no one.)
That doesn’t mean that consumers have to just take it. A growing number of frustrated callers have taken to social media to vent their frustration at the very companies who have placed them in telephone limbo. So many, in fact, that we decided to build a website to keep track and publish complaints from all of the Twitter users suck on hold: onholdwith.com.
