{"id":2904,"date":"2016-09-29T11:53:21","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T18:53:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/?p=2904"},"modified":"2016-09-29T11:53:21","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T18:53:21","slug":"dont-make-small-business-customers-wait-hold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/dont-make-small-business-customers-wait-hold\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t make small business customers wait on hold"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img class=\"wp-image-2907 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/EncorePro_540_female_workstation_head_turned_print_cmyk_17FEB15-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"EncorePro 540 lifestyle image\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/EncorePro_540_female_workstation_head_turned_print_cmyk_17FEB15-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/EncorePro_540_female_workstation_head_turned_print_cmyk_17FEB15-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/EncorePro_540_female_workstation_head_turned_print_cmyk_17FEB15-800x533.jpg 800w, https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/EncorePro_540_female_workstation_head_turned_print_cmyk_17FEB15-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/EncorePro_540_female_workstation_head_turned_print_cmyk_17FEB15-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/>Are you losing small business customers by putting them on hold? According to Accenture Strategy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.accenture.com\/us-en\/insight-digital-disconnect-customer-engagement?c=strat_stratsmcss_10000003&amp;n=smc_0316\">\u201cDigital Disconnect in Customer Engagement\u201d<\/a> 2016, 52% of consumers have reported switching providers because of poor customer service.<\/p>\n<p>A few years ago, Google conducted a <a href=\"http:\/\/customerthink.com\/google_surveys_callers_willingness_to_wait_on_hold\/\">study<\/a> to determine how long customers are willing to wait. It found that while 57.8% of callers were willing to be put on hold for up to 5 minutes. However, 32.3% were not willing to wait at all to speak to a customer service rep. Google concluded if a business keeps callers waiting longer than 5 minutes, it will lose 90% of those calls.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, waiting on hold is \u201cholding up\u201d a lot of time for customers. Conversational Receptionists, a provider of virtual receptionist and virtual assistant technology, compiled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conversational.com\/14-facts-about-customers-on-hold\/\">stats f<\/a>rom a number of studies and found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Executives spend 15 minutes every day\u2013that\u2019s 60 hours a year\u2013on hold. \u00a0<em>USA Today<\/em><\/li>\n<li>7 out of 10 business callers are placed on hold before the call is completed. <em>Inbound\/Outbound<\/em><\/li>\n<li>In their lifetime, the average person will spend 1.2 years on hold. <em>Woman\u2019s World Magazine<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Fortunately there are ways to avoid asking customers to wait. Among today\u2019s tools:<\/p>\n<h5><strong>Unified Communications<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p>Unified Communications (UC) provides a platform to integrate desk phones, PCs, smartphones and tablets into one integrated data and voice network so that these devices can talk to each other. UC also provides a host of collaboration tools, including e-mail, instant messaging (IM), web and video conferencing and fax.<\/p>\n<p>To avoid wait times, UC enables a small business contact center to coordinate different inbound phone numbers for inquiries. Those numbers ring to a specific desk or person so callers don\u2019t get frustrated being routed or waiting on hold. If the person answering the call needs to confer with a colleague, they can easily collaborate via instant messaging or launch an audio or video conference.<\/p>\n<h5><strong>Headsets <\/strong><\/h5>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.plantronics.com\/us\/solutions\/small-medium-business\/\">Headsets<\/a> can help avoid putting customers on hold when one of your small business team needs to get up from a desk to look for information or talk to a colleague who is somewhere else in the office.\u00a0 As an example, at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.plantronics.com\/media\/media-resources\/literature\/customer_stories\/rosenau-transport.pdf\">Rosenau Transport<\/a> in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the rates department is on the phone all day long answering calls from companies requesting quotes. Remote destinations can make it particularly challenging to determine rates, so team members often need to check with someone else in the office. Yet the rates staff can\u2019t afford to keep customers on hold too long to hunt down information. Impatient customers might hang up, costing Rosenau that shipment plus any future ones. Rosenau\u2019s solution was to provide everyone with Planronics wireless headsets, enabling them to move freely throughout the office yet stay on a call.<\/p>\n<h5><strong>Enhance Self-Service<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p>It\u2019s possible that not every customer inquiry needs to be answered over the phone. Make sure your website &#8211; traditional and mobile \u2013 has sufficient information to answer a number of the commonly asked product and service questions. There also should be a feature to enable a customer to send their information to your small business team and request a call. Once your team member gets on the phone, they need to be able to focus exclusively on the caller\u2019s need. Noise-canceling headsets ensure superior audio quality\u00a0 without the interruption of background noise.<\/p>\n<p>No one wants to be placed on hold. But if you MUST, consider adding music, preferably pop. A <a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/jasp.12282\/abstract\">study<\/a> reported in the <em>Journal of Applied Social Psychology<\/em> found that pop music rather than instrumental \u201celevator\u201d music resulted in lower caller anger. <em>\u201cAll You Need is Love<\/em>\u201d might just do the trick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are you losing small business customers by putting them on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[510],"tags":[8,1332,1333,338,1334],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}