Queue Management Strategy Massachusetts

By Cindy Waxer

Keep customers waiting on the other end of a phone just a few seconds too long, and they’re likely to hang up — for good. Fortunately, a well-considered queue-management strategy can reduce hold times and improve customer satisfaction. But unlike yesteryear’s first-come, first-serve routing approach, today’s queue-management solutions can perform sophisticated functions, from providing callers with an alternative to waiting to automatically sending customers to the agents best qualified to handle their requests. Here’s what every call-center manager needs to know about modern-day queue management.

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Patience Is a Rare Virtue

Don’t expect customers to display the same degree of patience they did four or five years ago. Said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in call centers and real-time analytics, “Nowadays, people are willing to wait a lot less. Expectations of customers have changed; they’re more demanding today than they were in the past.” That means that it's necessary to be able to serve announcements to callers in queue, route calls appropriately and offer expected-wait-time messaging as promptly as possible. But while Fluss said that “most North Americans are trained that a call should be answered between four to six rings,” there are no hard-and-fast rules regarding just how long customers are willing to suffer through queue or voice-mail hell. Different types of customer requests yield varying degrees of patience, while seasonal circumstances can cause customers to simply expect longer wait times.

No Shortage of Innovation

These days, queue management has much more to offer than simply assigning incoming calls to the next available agent. “There has been some good innovation in the area of routing,” said Fluss. Skills-based routing, for example, assigns incoming calls to the most suitable agent so that call centers can properly address a wider variety of call types. But it’s customer-callback technology that truly promises to transform queue management.  Take, for example, Virtual Hold Technology LLC’s flagship product, which allows customers to maintain their places in the calling queue without having to hold on the line. This allows customers to be more productive during busy call-center times and frees them from being tied to a phone. When a customer's turn comes to speak to a representative, he or she receives a return call in the same amount of time as if he or she had held on the phone.

Prod — Don’t Push

Companies need to recognize that there’s a fine line between offering callers an alternative to waiting on hold and pushing them away from the service they desire. Said Fluss, “It’s the right of the customer to interact with the business through their channel of choice. That’s a customer right.” That’s not to suggest, however, that companies shouldn’t configure their queue-management systems to include recorded messages that remind customers of alternative options such as email and Web-based customer support. Rather, Fluss said, “It’s OK to offer customers an alternative, as long as you’re not inviting them to go away.”

Keeping It Real

A well-crafted queue-management strategy can help ease the burden on busy agents while simultaneously boosting customer satisfaction. But don’t expect it to perform miracles. Many companies mistakenly believe that promptly routing callers to the right agents can help reduce a call center's head count. Unfortunately, that’s simply not the case. “It’s not as if the calls are going away,” said Fluss. “Queue management is a matter of better matching customer expectations.”

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