You can find a lot of useful information on social media. You can learn what your business is doing right mentions of your company, customer testimonials, etc. and (less pleasantly) what your business is doing wrong, based on complaints and critique. Those complaints hurt: according to a recent study by Edison Research, when customers complain about a brand on social media, 79% do so in hope that their friends/followers see their dissatisfaction with the brand. Ouch! But even when the chatter isn’t about you specifically whew you can learn from others’ mistakes.
For example, this Twitter account. The account @onholdwith tracks and tweets people who are complaining about waiting on hold for customer service with many kinds of companies. Here’s an example of the kind of tweets the account sends out:
Clicking on the link after more takes the user to a page with the actual complaints of the people who tweeted them, detailing the problems they’re having with various companies’ customer service. The complaints range from the annoyed I’ve been on hold with (company name) for 20 minutes! and waited on hold for 30 minutes with (company name), got disconnected with no callback! to more profane tweets that we won’t repeat here, in which tweeters vow never to use (company name) again and warn others to do the same. Just check out the account: some of these companies are huge, from cable companies to phone service providers, and they all have problems with keeping their customers waiting on hold.
The account only has about 650 followers, so it’s not exactly blasting the complaints from the rooftops. But it’s not this account that you really have to worry about it’s the complaints themselves. This account is merely aggregating the complaints that already exist: meanwhile, customer service grievances are being tweeted constantly, and they might be about you. You need to think long and hard about the customer service practices you have in your business that are enabling these complaints to exist. That is, long hold times, disconnections, annoying transfers, and all the other things you do unintentionally that drives your customers to madness on social media. Poor customer service is already a risk to your existing customers, but when you leave a caller on hold too long and they take to social media to vent? Now you’re risking new business too.
Get Them Off Hold. Fast.
In last year’s benchmarking analysis, we analyzed data about hold times and talk times for inbound calls to businesses of varying sizes. We found many interesting things, but one that stands out is the fact that 15% of callers tend to hang up right around 40 seconds of holding. In terms of sales, every second past that mark means you’re risking losing a possible deal. But in terms of customer service? If they hang up where do you think they’re going next? Maybe they’ll try calling you back later, or maybe they’re getting on their Twitter account to tell the world how terrible your customer service is. Remember, 79% do so in hope that their friends/followers see their dissatisfaction with the brand. If you ruin your day, they’re going to ruin yours. A study by YouGov showed that 6/10 customers have ditched a company because its telephone customer service has been so bad. So get them off hold fast.
How to Trim Down Hold Times
There are a number of tools you can use if your goal is to make customer service calls more efficient. The first is call tracking. One of the most common complaints I saw on the @onholdwith account was they asked for my information five times and I kept getting transferred! Sometimes transfers are unavoidable, but a caller should never have to provide their information multiple times. Call tracking captures the caller’s information and call source, integrating with your CRM so that no matter who takes the call, the caller’s info is easily accessed, keeping them from having to repeat themselves over and over.
IVR, too, is an easy tool to implement that enables customers to get fast self-service when they need it. Dozens of the callers listed as #onhold in the @onholdwith account needed to do simple things like pay their bill. They didn’t necessarily need to speak to a person to complete that task, but because the business they were calling didn’t use an IVR, they were forced to wait on hold.
A call distributor is also a must-have for trimming down hold times, especially if your business handles high call volumes. Rather than wasting caller and staff time with unnecessary transfers, ensure callers are being distributed to the correct department or specific agent from the moment they enter your phone tree, whether based on the call tracking information gathered from the unique phone number they dialed, or based on information the caller provides to the sophisticated IVR.
Whatever route you take, the key is taking control of your customer service and doing everything you can to ensure that they can reach you right away to discuss any problems they’re having because they can always reach social media.
Want to learn more? This free white paper can teach you the details of creating a more efficient system of customer service: Beyond the Cloud: The Next Generation of Virtual Call Centers.