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?
Big question: How should text-based communication work alongside voice for customer service? In the dark ages, the only answer to this was email, in its own silo, and a call center, in its own silo. Then real-time chat came along. And then messaging, powered by massive platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, made an appearance. Meanwhile, driving in its own lane, is good ‘ol SMS.
With the powerful tool of social media, customers everywhere now have an expansive platform with which to voice their feelings about their customer service experiences. This puts a huge amount of pressure on call center agents to perform. Of course, companies hope that their customers use these social platforms to sing the praises of their brand. But, of course, this is not always the case: An IBM study found that customer service operations are often both pricey and inefficient. Companies spend $1 trillion on 265 billion customer service calls each year and 50% of the complaints were unresolved.
While call centers continue to be a crucial component to a company’s customer service strategy, digital avenues are also becoming increasingly popular. In order for brands to remain competitive and provide the level of service consumers are expecting, they must take a multi-pronged approach to their customer service tactics.
Here at Fonolo, we understand the many issues call centers face in regards to staffing, spikes, hold times, call abandonment, and more. That is why we’ve tasked ourselves to research the best solutions to deal with these problems head-on. While nothing can beat call-backs in improving your call center experience for both customers and agents, we are happy to announce the findings from our years of research.
