Reducing your hold time will not only result in shorter overall handle times, but will increase both customer and employee satisfaction.
4 tips to reduce your customers hold time:
1. Empower your team!! Increase your frontline staff’s authority to make decisions. There’s nothing worse than waiting on hold to talk with someone only to realize that the person on the other end of the phone has absolutely ability or authority to help in making a simple decision that would be the resolution to your problem.
2. Create an online knowledge portal or database that your team can access quickly to answer customer questions. Just as important as the creation of this portal is the maintenance. Get your team involved and contributing to the available content based on their customer experiences and the resolutions.
3. Conversely, empower your customers!! By having much of the content in the knowledge portal available on your website in an easy to navigate form, customers can be more self-service in answering their own questions. Of course, this would be a simplified version of what you’re providing your staff as a means to not overwhelm the customer – After all, we want to help the customer, not further frustrate them.
4. Give your customers options!! The customer should be able to choose how they want to communicate with you. Self-service, live chat, email, toll free, or request a call back should all be options for the customer and demonstrating that you value their time.
Teltek is a Certified Avaya Business Partner, NEC Dealer, and Microsoft Partner with two locations in the Baltimore Metropolitan area. We specialize in providing one call technology support for small to mid-sized businesses and nonprofits in Maryland, Washington, DC, Virginia and Pennsylvania.