5 Things To Hate About Queue

As customers, we’re used to queuing, especially when we pick up the phone, but it doesn’t mean we’re happy about it, and it can definitely colour how we think about the organisation we need to speak to, with obvious ramifications for call abandonment rates and CSAT scores.

As a Contact Centre Manager, it’s not always within your power to ensure the wait is a short one. It is, however, possible to have an impact on how painful that queue experience will be for your callers. With that in mind, I’m going to lay out 5 common issues that could be turning your in-queue into telephone purgatory…

1. Repeating the same message

If you’ve got just 1 message going round and round, you’ll drive callers to distraction. Repetition is tiring and adds to the perceived wait time. In long queues, even having several messages might not be enough. Think about your wait times and use that to tailor the number of messages and how often they play.

2. One Track, One Sound

 In a similar vein: If you’ve got wait times longer than a few minutes it’s likely your chosen music track will be heard more than once, which also exposes your callers to repetition. If you thought hearing the same message was bad, there’s nothing quite like hearing the same 1 minute loop of music re-start for the 15th time.

3. “Your Call Is Important to Us”

Cliches lack sentiment – and in any case, the focus shouldn’t be on the organisation – it should be on the customer.

4. Deflection, deflection, deflection

Promoting self-serve has so many benefits for your organisation that deflection is a no-brainer. But callers may have already tried online, or decided it wasn’t for them, so for them, deflection is just irritating. Have a mix of different topics and script deflection messages with this in mind.

5. Short Music Time Between Messages

Don’t bombard your callers with too many messages. Unless you have short queues, i.e., less than 2 minutes, hearing a message play every 20 seconds can feel overwhelming. Leave at least 30 seconds between messages at the start of a queue, and as the wait time increases, so should the music gap between messages.

So… as promised, 5 things that could be driving your callers to hang up (and not in a positive “I think I’ll self-serve” kind of way). This list is far from exhaustive, if you’d like to know more, check out “10 Things I Hate About Queue” in our Good CX Guide, or give us a ring at Premier CX, where great queues are just one thing that we do!