Average hold time is an important metric which helps in the assessment levels of a business. This helps companies in understanding how well they are actually able to serve customers. It gives a clear picture of the ground realities and helps the management in understanding whether are not they are able to function in the desired manner or not. Average hold time doesn’t just give a clear idea of customer service but is actually extremely helpful in determining the performance of executives. The executives who are keeping customers on hold for a very long duration don’t exhibit professionalism and necessary training needs to be provided to them in order to ensure corrections in this arena.
A success of a call answering service, to a very large extent, is determined by the average hold time and call abandonment rates. Low average hold time is a sign of efficiency and good customer service and every call centre at the moment is thriving to achieve it. There are various ways in which it can be kept low and some of them are mentioned below.
Recording calls:
Recording all the calls is a practice which can reap long term benefits for any call answering service. By evaluating the recorded call, the productivity and efficiency of an agent can be easily understood. Review of calls actually helps businesses in identifying the loopholes and working towards improving that so that the best can be delivered to customers.
Empowering agents with knowledge:
If the agents hold a call answering service are knowledgeable and are able to help customers with their queries, then that would help them in closing calls much more quickly. Relevant answers can be found out to the problems of customers, instead of being blank and looking for answers. If the call centre agent is knowledgeable then his confidence and genuine solutions will help customers a lot.
Online assistance:
It would be impractical to expect that the executives would be knowing everything that the customer might end up asking. A better solution is providing an online assistance which can help executives get the answers real-time and that too without putting the calls on hold for long. This is a sure shot way of providing with the best of solutions without troubling the customers much.
Customer satisfaction is the most crucial thing for any business. It is a fact that nothing irritates customers more than being kept on hold. Even if you have provided a great product at the best price but if you fail to provide quality call answering service, rest of the factors would seldom hold any importance. Thus, continuous efforts need to be put in so as to ensure reduced average hold time.