on-hold

Who are YOU #OnHoldWith? The Top 10 Worst Companies to Call in 2019

By Ben Ringshall on December 11, 2019

Reply

HOLD IT: If you’ve ever sent a tweet complaining about being on hold, then chances are you’ve been featured on the Fonolo-powered website: onholdwith.com. It collects and curates the millions of Twitter complaints about being put on hold, and it has just released its annual list of hold-time offenders.

The site, launched by Fonolo a few years back, this year collected over a whopping hundreds of thousands of posts mentioning the phrase “on hold with” from Twitter. As we noted last year, Twitter has inreasingly become a go-to customer service platform for those wishing to air out their frustrating customer service experiences.

Tellingly, this year’s list indicates that brands are still leaving their customers hanging by forcing them to wait on hold. Lessening hold times should be a priority, as it will no doubt grow customer loyalty and faith in brands.

This year, some big surprises: Virgin Media, Verizon, and United Airlines are among the top culprits in the annual list of The Worst Companies to Call in 2019.

Did your company make the list?

Continue reading →

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

By Samantha Mehra on September 3, 2019

Reply

Build a deck. Outfit a room. Fill a prescription. Get a birthday card. Purchase a television. Scoop up school supplies. Order a couch. Snap up a subscription. Spend. Spend. Spend. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

In every facet of a customer’s life, there is at least some encounter with the retail space, an investment of their funds in DIY projects, in personal healthcare, in family activities, in leisure, or in bare necessities. The retail industry is buoyed by this reality and is much obliged to exchange a customer’s hard-earned dollars for goods and services, but oftentimes is ill-equipped to serve the masses of consumers when they things go wrong with a product, service, or delivery. And make no mistake: Things always go wrong.

Continue reading →

Hold It!: The Top 10 Worst Companies You Called in 2018

By Samantha Mehra on December 11, 2018

Reply

HOLD EVERYTHING: The results are in.

Onholdwith.com, the Fonolo-powered site that mines Twitter for real-time complaints about being put on hold (and folks, there are many, many complaints), has today made its annual list of hold-time offenders available for all the world to see. And you may be surprised by who made the list.

OnHoldWith.com, launched by Fonolo a few years back, this year collected over a whopping 165,000 posts mentioning the phrase “on hold with” from Twitter. And as those of us in customer service know to a sobering degree, Twitter has quickly become a go-to platform customers use to shout about frustrating customer service experiences. The tweets informing the report this year confirm that: a) customers are increasingly turning to social media to publicly out companies for poor customer service handling; and b) a benchmark of this poor service is placing a customer on hold.

While the companies on this year’s top 10 list are doing exquisite things in their industries (and trust us, we are big fans of all of them), the results of this year’s report signal that brands could be doing things even better, starting with sprucing up their customer service offerings.

So, here’s a good question: Did your company make the list?

Continue reading →

5 Big Call Center Mistakes to Watch Out For [Infographic]

By Nicolina Savelli on August 31, 2016

1

We live in the age of the customer and increasing expectations are making it harder than ever for contact centers to feel good about their operations. In fact, only 1% of customers feel that their expectations of good customer service are always met. *Ouch* It’s like what they say, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Today, contact centers and agents have to strive for excellence at every single touch point of a customer interaction to convince customers that they’re doing everything in their power to meet their needs. And as you can imagine, this task is much easier said than done.

Effective contact center communications involve a number of factors, and sometimes, even when everything appears to be in place, business needs can change. In order for managers to successfully optimize agent performance, it’s important that they keep their eyes peeled for these 5 big mistakes that happen every single day in the contact center: Continue reading →

True Confessions: Are You Guilty of These Customer Service Pitfalls?

By Nicolina Savelli on May 11, 2016

Reply

True Confessions: Are You Guilty of These Customer Service Pitfalls? Each year companies lose an estimated $41 billion due to their poor customer service. On top of this, nearly 80% of contact centers say their current customer service systems won’t meet their future needs. At that rate, those estimated losses are destined to increase drastically unless customer service leaders make a change.

It’s okay, we understand, no one is perfect. But it’s time to shed some light on those common customer service shortcomings (without any judgment, of course). Today, we’re exploring five true confessions of contact center and customer service professionals in hopes of aiding them and others on their quest to improve and eliminate these pitfalls for good. Continue reading →

The Growing Popularity of Call-Backs for the Call Center

By Shai Berger on November 17, 2015

Reply

The Growing Popularity of Call-Backs for the Call Center Is your contact center still forcing callers to wait on hold? If so, you are missing out on a great opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and reduce call center costs. Not surprisingly, 75% have said the option of a call-back highly appeals to them. If that’s not reason enough, how about some peer pressure?

The Contact Center Decision Maker’s Guide is one of the most exhaustive studies of the industry and the 8^th edition was recently released by our friends at ContactBabel. It has a terrific section on call-backs, and we’re very pleased to see that more and more call centers are adding call-back options.

Today’s consumers have very high expectations when it comes to customer service in general, and contact centers in particular. 76% say just ONE unpleasant contact center experience is enough to make them take their business elsewhere. The pressure is on. Continue reading →

Fonolo Partners with Aspect on Multi-Channel Call-Backs

By Jason Bigue on June 9, 2015

Reply

One of the stats we often lead with is from Forrester, who notes that “75% of callers think the option of a call-back is ‘highly appealing’.” It’s simple and clearly illustrates the point that most people prefer not to wait on hold. This is at the essence of the services we provide at Fonolo.

To do this (i.e. replace hold-time with a call-back), a company like ours has to support a wide range of platforms – not just different vendors, but also a range of products (of different vintages) from each vendor. What this means is that we spent a great deal of our time with infrastructure companies in order to make sure we have maximum interoperability.

Luckily, Fonolo’s solution is cloud-based, which makes it relatively easy to integrate with any technology. But, we also have the ability to integrate more deeply, where we can offer some extra functionality (for example, with our on-premise Call-Back Appliances).

Which brings me to today’s news: we’ve just announced a partnership with Aspect, which allows us to expand our call-back offering (including web and mobile) for customers on their platform. We have a number of customers operating Aspect contact centers, so this is truly great news for us. Continue reading →

3 Call Center Ideas That Totally Miss the Point

By Jason Bigue on May 21, 2015

2

I was looking for an example of how someone can completely miss the point, when I stumbled across this joke:

A guy shows up late for work. The boss yells, “You should have been here at 8:30!” he replies, “Why? What happened at 8:30?”

Companies, not unlike people, often miss the point. (Not to single out marketing departments, but they’re often the worst offenders.) Here are 3 call center ideas that totally miss the point. Continue reading →