How long is four and a half minutes? It depends on the context. If you're rushing to make a flight, it can go by in the blink of an eye. But if your boss is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and you're sitting with him while on hold on your company's own customer service hotline, four and a half minutes probably feels like eternity.
That's the story Brad Stone tells in his book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. In one meeting of Amazon executives during the holiday season, Bezos asked his global VP of customer service how long the telephone-support hold times were. When he was told they were less than a minute, Bezos dialed the number on the room's speaker phone to check for himself.
It was four and a half interminable, uncomfortable minutes before anyone answered the call.
Wait time is not one of the components that make up average handle time (AHT) but it is a critical call center metric that measures time from the moment the customer calls until they are connected with a representative. Long wait times impact customer churn and CSAT. Things get more complex when a customer has a long wait time and a long handle time. The lower the AHT, the more efficient a call center tends to be operating. It means a representative can handle more calls, more customers can be served, and customers will see resolutions more quickly.
Of course, AHT includes the time an agent spends on the phone with the customer and any post-call work the agent needs to do. This means that there are multiple approaches to reducing AHT:
- Help agents be more efficient during the call to get customers off the phone more quickly
- Automate various post-call tasks to get agents ready to take the next call more quickly.
As Jeff Bezos proved in that uncomfortable executive meeting, a relatively short wait time of four and a half minutes can feel like forever — especially if a customer is already frustrated or short on time. In fact, a recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of respondents would wait just two minutes before hanging up, while 13 percent indicated that there's no amount of hold time that is acceptable. When wait times are high and handle times are high frustration levels soar. Frustrated callers usually take longer to explain why they are calling and require the agent to spend time reassuring the customer. The worse scenario would be long wait, high handle time and low call resolution.
There is a correlation between wait times and AHT in that forecasts use AHT to determine requirements. However, if the center typically understaffs wait times will increase.
Fortunately, there are practical things a company can do to manage unpredictable customer traffic. This includes getting the right employees in the right place at the right time using forecasting tools.
Modern workforce management solutions let companies forecast volume on all customer service channels, including voice, email and social media. They use artificial intelligence to recognize trends and cycles in historical data, as well as cause-and-effect relationships between customer service volume and other factors to help call center managers confidently manage staffing levels. Proper staffing levels will bring service levels in line with expectations. The goal is to manage staffing levels appropriately and take the necessary steps to answer the customers call promptly the first time they call.
