Business Strategy

Avoid customer impatience and reduce rising call-abandonment rates.

If you expect to compete with mega-sized companies in your market, you'll need to focus more on service delivery and less on cost cutting in your call center. Customer impatience contributes to 13.3 percent of calls being abandoned before they are answered—a sizable increase from 5 percent in 2004 and an all-time high. This increase suggests that many customer-facing organizations are not effectively using technology and staffing levels to support their clients.

According to Dimension Data's 2005 Merchants Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report, which surveyed 166 call centers worldwide, customers expect calls to be answered more quickly than ever before: Today, customers wait just 65 seconds before hanging up, compared to an average of 71 seconds in 2003.

It's not always easy to quantify the effects of making customers wait, says Mark Stanley, a principal with the management consulting firm Crestview Consulting. "Short term, the effect of a wait may be that I will hang up and call back later," he says. "If the problem persists over the long term, most people will simply find another place that is more attentive to their needs."

Strategies for Reducing Customer Wait Times

Contact centers can use a variety of tactics to reduce customer wait times. Elizabeth Ahearn, president and CEO of The Radclyffe Group LLC, a consulting and training firm for contact-center clients, suggests that companies use a solid forecasting model to predict their staffing needs, focusing on a best-practice goal of 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds.

To make interaction with customers even more effective, companies can create a "call strategy" to help representatives navigate conversations more efficiently.

Technology Aids Call Center Operations

Depending on the size of your operations, it may be worthwhile to look beyond staffing levels as you devise a customer-service strategy. For example, adding technology to the mix can improve call-center operations, from user-friendly interactive voice response to queuing or intelligent routing. Network based customer-contact solutions such as these can help to get customers to the most appropriate service resources more quickly.

Bob Furniss, president of contact center consulting firm Touchpoint Associates, believes that organizations need to communicate the value of customer service and relate it to the work that representatives do. With the right tools and information, he says, contact centers can pay more, hire better, buy tools for better forecasting, and allocate more hours to training—all of which can facilitate better customer service.