on-hold-with

Who are you #OnHoldWith? The Top On-Hold Offenders in the Airline Industry

By Jessica Suezin on June 27, 2018

3

The Top On-Hold Offenders in the Airline Industry As the weather warms up in the West and many take off for their summer holidays, customers are increasingly dealing with big-brand companies in the business of travel: Airlines. Modern airline customer service (CS) is a far cry from the days when Don Draper-like marketers were designing prime service experiences for anyone who could afford to climb aboard (as marketed in the below 1954 ad for American Airlines).

This month, some of the top global airlines have been criticized on social media for their insufferably poor customer service, including established companies like American Airlines, British Airways, Norwegian Airlines, Aer Lingus, Thomas Cook, Lufthansa, and Air Canada. The hold times, lack of response, poor multi-channel infrastructure, and even poor in-cabin experiences have now conflated bad CS with the airline industry, so much so that it has become something The Onion has parodied many times, including here, here, and here.

Continue reading →

3 Takeaways from Our Live Discussion on Crisis Management for Customer Service [Video]

By Daniela Puzzo on December 5, 2017

Reply

Last week, Fonolo hosted an insightful live discussion on how to handle customer service in a crisis. This expert panel discussed what brands can do to ensure that customer service is not compromised during times of stress in the contact center. They touched on social media for crisis management, reducing customer frustration, and so much more! To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.

First, let’s take a quick look at the panel of speakers: Nate Brown from UL EHS Sustainability, Jim Rembach from Beyond Morale, Shep Hyken from Shepard Presentations, Rainer Uphoff from Avionline, Omer Minkara from Aberdeen Group, and Shai Berger from Fonolo.

Continue reading →

6 Things to Do When You’re Put on Hold

By Nicolina Savelli on November 23, 2017

Reply

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve been placed on hold at least once in your lifetime. In fact, 45% of customers can’t remember having a recent positive experience, and 35% of them say it was directly related to poor response times. This is a serious problem since timeliness is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. When organizations make customers wait for assistance, it can force them to seriously question why they still do business with you at all. Take a quick look at onholdwith.com for some shocking insight on hold time offenders.

Okay, okay, we’ve spelled out why hold times are so terrible, but unfortunately they are still a regular occurrence. Let’s see how we can try and make it a little more bearable.

Here are 6 things you can do to make it through those long, lonely, wait times: Continue reading →

How to Deliver Great Customer Service in a Crisis [Live Discussion]

By Nicolina Savelli on November 9, 2017

Reply

On any given day, contact centers run the risk of experiencing a surge in call volume. That risk is amplified when unexpected events like poor weather, high agent absenteeism, or technical issues occur. When these things happen, call centers must be prepared to address customer needs in a timely and courteous way, despite the challenging situation. News of poor customer service reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for good service, so reducing the number of negative interactions is integral to a brand’s reputation.

Although most companies understand this, they continue to leave customers on hold. Brands who value the customer experience know that this is not acceptable. Luckily, with the proper solutions in place, any contact center can effectively deliver high quality service, even in a crunch. Continue reading →

Top 10 Angry Tweets from Customers Waiting On Hold

By Nicolina Savelli on September 13, 2017

Reply

Onholdwith.com is a community-driven platform that aims to end hold time for customers. The website tracks companies who are experiencing the most complaints on Twitter from people waiting on hold. It’s our way of recognizing which businesses need to improve their call center hold times, and could benefit from a call-back solution like Fonolo’s. But the most interesting part of onholdwith.com are the tweets themselves.

By the time someone has taken to social media to unleash their innermost hold-time frustrations, the result can be truly eye-opening, and sometimes pretty darn hilarious. I mean, if you’re waiting on hold for 4 hours, you have to find humor in hearing, “Your call is important to us, please hold,” for the 89^th time, right?

We’ve looked at the top 10 hold time offenders this month, and scoured their Twitter complaints to compile some of the most cringe-worthy responses to waiting on hold.

Continue reading →

Countdown: The 25 Worst Hold Time Offenders of 2016

By Nicolina Savelli on December 6, 2016

3

Hold the Phone: Companies to Avoid Calling Over the Holidays If you’ve ever tweeted about waiting on hold with a call center your frustrations have likely been cataloged on onholdwith.com. The site scans Twitter for complaints about being on hold with customer service and categorizes them in real-time by company and industry name. Fonolo launched onholdwith.com as a public service so that people could vent about being on hold while organizations can see how much goodwill they were losing from customers.

For many, simply knowing that they are not alone provides comfort during an otherwise anxiety ridden experience. The larger purpose of the site is to bring greater awareness to the problem of long hold times and help companies benefit from Fonolo’s call-back solutions. If you head on over to the site, you’ll see that we’ve done a complete overhaul in hopes of giving customers and companies a better chance to share their stories and correct this problem. Continue reading →

Who Are You #OnHoldWith? Top Twitter Complaints this Month [Infographic]

By Nicolina Savelli on July 27, 2016

Reply

It’s time for a mid-summer’s round up of the worst onholdwith.com offenders we’ve seen this month. At the beginning of 2016 we released the “Top 10 Twitter Complaints to Start the Year” and it looks like we still have some familiar faces on the list, as well as some new offenders to shake a finger at.

Brand new to this month’s list is: Citibank, who catapulted all the way up to number two! Purolator also out #failed UPS with hold-time this month – inching into the 8^th spot – knocking UPS off the list (but we won’t count UPS out of our year-end offender list just yet). And – in a somewhat surprising turn – this month’s highest complaint holder was Southwest Airlines, who jumped from seventh place to first place. Southwest recently encountered massive flight delays and cancellations due to poor weather, which essentially created a customer service catastrophe. Maybe next time they should have call-backs on tap to avert this kind of crisis. Continue reading →

How to Protect Your Brand from Angry Tweeters [OHW Offenders]

By Nicolina Savelli on April 13, 2016

1

According to Twitter, in the past two years the number of Tweets directed at leading brands’ customer service usernames has grown by 2.5x and that number is rising exponentially every year (50% to be exact). In the same report, Twitter found that 85% of customers who have a satisfactory social interaction are likely to recommend the brand to others. So, when a customer turns to social to contact you, it’s important to do your best to resolve issues as timely and accurately as possible. However, if your company is doing a great job responding to customers, but you’re still seeing a plethora of angry tweets directed at you, maybe the problem is how you’re handling callers. Social customer service should work in tandem with phone, chat, mobile, web etc. – you shouldn’t have to choose to be good at one thing or another. Continue reading →

Video: Top 5 Worst Hold-Time Offenders for 2015

By Nicolina Savelli on December 17, 2015

Reply

We’re kicking off our vlog series with a holiday wrap-up featuring the worst hold-time offenders for 2015.

At Fonolo we track hold-time complaints through the twitter handle & hashtag onholdwith to help seek retribution for those suffering from long customer service hold-times.

In this video you’ll find out what companies made the naughty list by putting their customers on hold the most this year! Some may surprise you – others, not so much!

Check it out…

Continue reading →

4 Reasons You Gotta Stop Leaving Customers on Hold

By Daniela Puzzo on December 10, 2015

1

4 Reasons You Gotta Stop Leaving Customers on Hold Here’s the story of Fred Clause, the customer who just purchased a TV from your retail store. Fred’s excited to have his new 60” Smart TV set up and ready for holiday entertainment. Suddenly Fred has a problem, his TV screen went black – nothing’s working! Fred double checks the manual – he did everything right. He pulls out his phone and does a quick search online to see if the can find a resolution – no luck.

Fred NEEDS human interaction, but he HATES the call center experience and LOATHS waiting on hold. There are even more people, just like Fred, calling your customer service for support. It’s about to get ugly. Unfortunately, you haven’t realized all the reasons why you just gotta stop leaving these poor customers on hold. Well, I’m here to help clarify it. Continue reading →