Even the best wait-time music isn’t changing what customers think when you make them wait – and it’s not good.
Whether customers wait on the phone, at their homes for a tech or for a response to a text or e-mail, they’ll conjure up bad things about your Service and company.
In the new Cost of Waiting study by TOA Technologies, 61% of customers think companies don’t care about their time when they have to wait. Here’s more of their thoughts:
- “Companies know we’ll wait, and they take advantage of it” (58%)
- “The company doesn’t know how to schedule staff” (55%)
- “They don’t know how to predict the length of time it takes to perform services” (32%).
Making customers wait can drastically hurt companies’ reputations. If customers are thinking any of the above while they wait for a tech to show up or for an answer to a question they e-mailed yesterday, you can bet they’re telling friends about the disappointment.
To avoid making customers wait:
- Give them options. For calls, invite them to leave a message and be called back within a certain time frame. For appointments, narrow the window for arrival to within a half-hour on a couple of different days – that’s tolerable for almost any customer.
- Answer immediately. Keep someone available to at least answer calls personally and route them. The wait is more tolerable when customers have talked to a person. Create automatic responses to e-mail that indicate when the personalized answer will be sent. Have techs make personal calls before they arrive.
