It’s no secret that being on hold is frustrating. In fact, 60% of customers believe that long hold times are the most frustrating aspect of customer service. In addition, on average, customers will abandon calls when they’ve been waiting on hold for 2 minutes and 36 seconds.
As a business, it’s critical to reduce call wait times as much as possible. One way to do this is through effective and efficient call queue management.
Related: What is a Call Queue?
How do you make the best use of call queues? In this guide, we’ll share 12 best practices for call queue management that will enable you to capture more incoming calls, increase your customer satisfaction, and boost conversion rates. But first, let’s start with the basics!
A call queue is basically a line of callers waiting to speak to someone in your organization. As calls come into your main phone number, call queue management software routes them based on a variety of “rules” that you specify depending on your business requirements. For example, if all of your customer service agents are busy, you can direct callers to your Customer Success team to handle overflow.
These rules, also known as real-time queue management, determine how those calls are routed. When done well, call queue management results in an improved and more efficient call flow. Customers spend less time on hold, and businesses benefit from higher customer satisfaction scores. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
If you’re wondering where to start, here are 12 best practices to adopt to level up your call queue management process.
Ideally, you'd answer all your callers immediately, but sometimes this just isn't possible. When your lines are busy, you can take some steps to provide your customers with as positive an experience as possible using your call queue management system.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind and features that your business phone system should include to help you make the most of call queue management.
The first thing your phone system should be able to do is specify an action or call path based on the day of the week or time of day.
For example, you might want to have different greetings or routing rules for business hours and weekdays versus weekends, evenings, and holidays. By matching a greeting or agent availability with the appropriate time of day, you can set the stage for a positive customer experience.
With scheduling rules, if a customer calls after hours, they can be automatically directed to a voicemail inbox letting them know the office is now closed and to please leave a message.
It may seem obvious, but it still needs to be stated that you should have a friendly greeting that identifies your business, provides helpful information, directs callers to the right place, and informs them of what to do next.
Your greeting should provide callers with basic information or common inquiries so that you can potentially answer their questions without the need to talk to a team member. For example, these greetings and announcements could include your business hours, address, or other information that people tend to ask for when they call.
In today’s global, multicultural, and multilingual society, you can’t assume that all of your callers speak the same language.
If you have multilingual staff, create a queue for a specific language that will run to different language-centered queues. Instead of encountering a frustrating language barrier, you can give callers the option to be connected to agents who speak their language.
Routing options ensure your call flows stay efficient and run smoothly. Here are some different routing options.
There are several ways to make your call queue management system more efficient, and software is continuously adding new capabilities and strategies to help you answer your callers better. For example, net2phone’s Call Center Essentials provides businesses with advanced call routing options to improve call flows.
Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, allows callers to interact with your phone system. Callers are presented with options to get answers to their questions, input data, or select specific types of help. For example, your system can ask callers what they need help with and they can give the response, “speak to an agent.” Your system can then ask what callers would like to speak to an agent about.
If you put callers on hold and give them silence, it can give the impression that more time is passing or make them feel like they've been abandoned. Having upbeat or relaxing music on hold can be a pleasant way to distract callers while they wait. Make sure your music-on-hold sounds clear and crisp. There's nothing worse than washed-out music or listening to tunes with a lot of static.
With many systems, you can also set custom music on hold to share important messages or marketing material while callers wait.
When a caller finds out that there’s an extended hold period, they might prefer to receive a callback when someone is free as opposed to waiting in a long queue. Selecting this option ensures callers don’t lose their place in line and can be an ideal option. In fact, 63% of customers prefer a callback over waiting on hold.
Being on hold with no end in sight or no idea how long you'll be there can be incredibly frustrating. Using a queue position announcement informs callers of exactly where they are in the queue. If they’ve been on hold for a couple of minutes and are losing patience, you can potentially save the call by being able to have the system inform them that they are next in line.
No matter how carefully you plan your staff's schedule to ensure that someone is always available to take calls, the unexpected can, and often does, happen. If you have too many calls and can't answer inquiries in a timely manner, a maximum hold time may route callers to voicemail or another office location.
While it’s not ideal to keep callers on hold for a long time, it’s better than keeping them on hold indefinitely.
To avoid unreasonably long wait times, you can limit the number of callers waiting in your queue at any given time. When the maximum number of callers waiting is reached, you can specify a method to handle the call overflow.
For example, the caller can leave a voicemail message and be called back when an employee is available, or they can be transferred to another location where employees are standing by.
Call queue management contains reports and analytics that provide valuable insights into wait times, call duration, agent activity, and more. Your team can use this information to improve customer service by optimizing agent rosters, adjusting call routing rules, and identifying opportunities for training.
Finally, providing multiple ways for customers to contact your business can also help you effectively manage your business communication. In your welcome messaging and through custom music on hold, you can let callers know that you also have a live chat option or a customer support inbox. This reduces the overall number of calls you receive and provides call queue management. An omnichannel platform can help.
net2phone’s omnichannel contact center solution uContact allows customers to contact businesses through telephone calls, live chat, email, social media channels, and even WhatsApp. At the same time, it also provides businesses with a single snapshot view of the entire customer journey from one screen, allowing them to provide a better overall customer experience.
By following these best practices, you can ensure your business has a competitive advantage, delight your customers with every interaction, and ultimately boost your bottom line.
net2phone's call queueing software automatically distributes calls between available team members. Thresholds can be set so that if the wait time exceeds a certain amount or a certain number of people are waiting in the queue, the call will route to another queue or destination, ensuring all calls are answered in a timely manner.
Get started by having a conversation with one of our business communication experts today!