Call center or contact centers often receive inbound calls, which can be one of the following:
- Prospective customers calling to inquire or
- Existing customers calling to raise a complaint
In both cases, keeping them waiting in the call queue would not be a good approach. Let’s understand more about call queues and why a call center must monitor the same.
What is a call queue?
From simple to intelligent call center software, when a call center buys a software, it also buys the capacity of X number of parallel calls. In technical terms, it is known as agent seats. For example, if a call center buys an intelligent call center solution with 5 agent seats, then it means there can be 5 parallel calls.
Now, continuing the above-mentioned example, when 5 customers call to the call center, there are already 5 agents to take the call and attend them. However, if now 6th, 7th, and consecutive customers call to the call center, there are no more agents available to attend these customers until one of them finish the ongoing call. Thus, these customers are added to the call queue.
Call queue is the place where customers or callers who make a call to the call center join a queue and wait for their turn. You can say it is a virtual queue, in which, callers wait for an agent to finish an ongoing call and talk to them.
Why call centers must give attention to call queue?
Giving attention to call queue means monitoring call queue for the following questions:
How long a call queue gets in peak hours?
What is the average call hold time?
There are multiple reasons for monitoring a call queue and we are going to explain the top two of them:
1. To generate good revenues
If your prospects are calling you and your call queue is too long, you might lose the prospects as he has more options. Likewise, you can also lose your customer as he often has to wait in long call queues. He would look for another option and as we all know your competitors must be lurking for this opportunity.
2. To reduce customer frustration
If your customer is calling because he is facing an issue with what you have offered to him, then he is anyways irritated. Now, imagine your call queue has 10 minutes of waiting time, in which, of course, you play a message,
“All our agents are busy. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line”.
This will build up frustration and when the customer actually connects with the agent, he or she is already highly frustrated. Moreover, if your customer has to pay calling charges, in other words, if you do not have a toll free helpline number, then this frustration will be even higher.
In a nutshell, your call queue in your intelligent call center software defines the quality of service you offer to your customers and prospects. Thus, all call centers must give attention to it and also must take the required steps to reduce call wait time.