Throughout their lifetime, the average person spends five years waiting in lines and queues. More specifically, they are put on hold for a total of 43 days listening to the lovely, but oh so irritating, music whilst waiting on the phone. This isn’t exactly what you would call a ‘good Customer Experience’. Time to do something about it and alleviate the pain of customers who have to wait!
Minimize your waiting time, start by measuring
It’s your task as an organization to make sure that waiting times are limited to an absolute minimum. This often seems quite obvious but, in reality, it still happens way too often. If you aren’t already doing it then it’s a good idea to have your customer service workforce keep a very detailed record of what the customer exactly wanted. Then, the system can be tuned to handle more and more of the calls to reduce operator time and thus improve the customer experience.
Besides keeping a detailed record, it’s also important to start measuring the time your customer was waiting. For example, keep track of how long a customer has to wait for his price offer or how long a service request stays “unsolved”.
Discover the crucial moments where it goes wrong
As soon as the processing times are being measured, you’ll receive some interesting insights by, for example, analyzing averages and identifying ‘peak moments’. A peak moment is when a customer has a unique experience that rises above the rest.
Another way to discover crucial moments in customer service is by using ‘process mining’. This is a systematic way of collecting and analyzing your data to create an overview of how your customer is feeling towards your organization. It enables you to get the current status – tackling the issue of ‘who does what when?’. It allows you to create a baseline of the experience that your organization delivers to your customers by capturing the various processes that deliver that experience. Process mining can provide powerful insights into the customer experience. Moreover, the collection and dissemination of such insights provide a strategic resource for continuous improvements in organizational service quality and capacity.
‘Soften’ the waiting time as much as possible
Of course, you have to stay realistic. Is it possible to never let your customer wait again? Unfortunately not. For that reason, why not implement a technique that ‘softens’ the time your customer has to wait. For example, the recording could share news about your company or its products which would distract them during their wait. Double win!