One of the main things that you need to think about when you use an answering service is how long your customers will be on hold. This is important for several reasons, and you should talk to your potential service about how long your customers will be on hold. Here are just a few reasons that hold times are particularly important for you and your customers.
The most important thing that hold times can do for you is get you or lose you customers. In this world of immediate gratification, customers don’t like to stay on hold for more than thirty seconds, which can seem like an eternity when you’re listening to terrible elevator music and waiting to have a problem solved. If your answering service actually answers calls from potential customers, you could either gain them or lose them depending on hold times.
If customers are calling around to several different businesses to check out pricing or services, they may end up choosing the place that puts them on hold for the least amount of time, since this will affect their views of the business’s customer service. Some people thinking about trying a new business or service won’t even stay on the phone long enough to talk to a representative if they are on hold for too long.
Another reason that hold times are vital is that they affect your customer’s view of your customer service department. If the answering service you’re using is functioning as your customer service department, it can build your customer relations or completely ruin them. This doesn’t even have to have anything to do with how the representatives actually answer the phone, since customers who talk to the most helpful of representatives can end up feeling completely dissatisfied if they are on hold for several minutes.
Obviously these are two very good reasons to check out hold times when you’re looking at different services for answering your business phones. Different services will tell you their average hold times, but some of them might be messing with the numbers a little. The best way to see who will have decent hold times is to look at how many phone calls representatives are expected to handle. The fewer phone calls per representative, the less time your customers are going to have to spend on hold. The average hold time is one or two minutes, which is way too long, so you should shoot for an answering service with average hold times of thirty seconds or less.
