Call Center Queue: Definition and Features For Call Center Queuing  

What differentiates a call to a call center from a common call to your friend or whoever else? First of all, you rarely can hear phone rings while calling a call center - more likely you will hear the greeting message from the IVR system, and offer to press some buttons on your phone to choose a fitting IVR menu section or to order a connection with an agent directly, without any surfing through the Interactive Voice Response interface. If you choose to go straight for a call to an agent, you will definitely be asked to wait for a little while listening to on-hold music in the background until the free agent will pick up a call. All this time, from pressing the “Wait for the connection to the agent” button to a moment when you will hear so awaited “Hi!” from a human agent you are put in a call center queue. The funny fact is that many call centers still use that feature of notifying you that “all agents are busy, please wait for X seconds/minutes”, and many people are wondering if it is normal for a call center to receive that many calls on a regular basis. The reality is simple - as always - all incoming calls are put in a call center queue just because it is the way system works. It doesn’t mean all agents are always busy or call centers aren’t going to answer inbound calls timely, but let’s turn back to such a concept as call center service level, which says that 80% of incoming calls have to be answered within first 20 seconds of call - and such disposition is considered an example of excellent customer service. So, for you these 20 secs are 20 secs in a call center queue, because the system, even though it is totally automated and works faster than any human being, still needs a few seconds to process call routing, or, in other words, forward you to a proper agent. 

But what is wrong with the concept of a call center queue? First of all, it is quite obvious that being put in a call center queue is the least pleasant part of any customer journey regarding contacting a call center. Secondly, let’s take into consideration that different people are ready to wait for different durations of time - in one case, a minute of waiting time will be absolutely acceptable for a customer, and another customer will get mad after 20 seconds of waiting. 

That’s why we decided to write this guide, even though we have already written a big guide about call center queue management, which you can read here. Nonetheless, we are not going to talk about call center queue management, we are going to talk about the main technologies and tools you can use in your contact center to reduce call center queue average waiting time and boost customer satisfaction and general customer experience. Also, let’s discuss some aspects which make people hate call center queues that much - you’ll be surprised by the statistical data, we swear. 

What is a call center queue?

A call center queue (contact center queue), in general, is a kind of virtual queues where inbound calls are put before being routed to the call center agents. Nonetheless, the call center queue now isn’t about inbound calls only - if you have ever used a web chat, you know that there is also a kind of queue - a delay between the moment you initiated a chat session and a moment when the agent entered the chat. So, the perfect way to define queueing in a contact center is to say that a call center queue is an invisible queue that consists of inbound customer requests for connection to agents and lasts from the moment when the customer initiated such a connection until the agent connects to a conversation in any communication channel where such call center queue is available. 

Thus, a call center queue awaits everyone who is going to contact the customer service department, and the digital era didn’t eliminate call center queuing, but spread it to other contact channels, such as webchats. 

Call center queue isn’t only a place where customers listen to music and wait for agent arrival, it is a complex environment that is permanently monitored and created by numerous other systems, such as ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) software, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) software, and so on. 

Call center queue exists as a concept at least because it is the easiest way to establish intelligent call routing, avoid overloads of the calls, and control the call center's proper functioning. Just imagine a situation where all customer calls would have been forwarded directly to agents - either one agent would have received dozens of calls at the same time, or the system would have fallen into a breakdown. Call center queuing provides balance and fair service for all customers, so it isn’t an “absolute evil”, as some angry customers often call it. But improper use of a call center queue and lack of attention to call center queue management can surely cause many troubles, especially when it comes to customer satisfaction and call abandonment. 

What problems a long call center queue wait time may cause? 

It is an aspect of call center queuing we have never discussed before, at least in detail. Long call center queue times are the most harmful issue that can ever be experienced by call center managers - and here is why. 

Call abandonment rate

Such a call center metric as call abandonment rate is all about call queuing. Why? First of all, it measures only calls that were lost during waiting in a call center queue. Calls that were hung up due to poor call quality or connection issues are called dropped calls, and here is the definition of call abandonment rate - it is a call center metric that shows a percentage of inbound calls which were hung up by a customer before the agent entered the conversation. And yes, it is not very difficult to state that there are only a few reasons for call abandonment - it is either too long waiting time in a call center queue or a very frustrating experience of interacting with the IVR system (or auto attendant) before being put in a call center queue which caused customer frustration. 

First of all, let’s look at the stats - this report shows that 22% of clients evaluate average wait times in a call center queue as “too long”, and the other 52% said they are awaiting fast resolution of customer issues from the contact center team. Is there any connection between long call center queue wait times and fast resolution? Rhetorical question. For instance, another study has shown that over 60% of clients consider long wait times as the most frustrating part of their call center experience. A study from the healthcare industry has shown that over 20% of clients have decided to purchase medicine elsewhere due to long wait times in a call center queue. How much money did they lose on that? 

IVR system, especially poorly designed IVR system, is another reason why clients choose to hang up the call instead of moving forward on their path to the agent - yes, it is literally a path, which is full of frustration and useless repetitive actions in many cases. Clients have to pass through numerous menu sections, and listen to unnecessary ads and useless information - for their issue - and only after a few minutes of wandering in the maze client find the option to call an agent and… get into a call center queue. Isn’t that frustrating? 

Nevertheless, even call abandonment isn’t the worst problem that can be generated by poor call center queue management. Much worse is if its consequences become real - but let’s talk about it below. 

Customer churn

What a client feels who called you, passed through that annoying IVR solution, and waited in a call center queue, but the totality of these negative feelings and experiences made him or her hang up the call? Absolute frustration and anger. Some purposeful customers even don’t hang up their phone calls, they wait for a connection with an agent to tell them all they think about your call center and your company. Such people generate conflicts, and they are those angry customers everyone is afraid of. But aren’t they right in such a case? 

After such a negative customer experience, a client can easily decide that this is enough. Negative associations with your company can cause a situation where clients will never again be ready to choose your service, and this is a moment where is no way back. Customers, who leave your company, increase the customer churn rate - a specific customer service metric, opposite to the customer retention rate. It is almost always calculated on an annual basis, but poor call center queue management and improper call center queuing may make you measure it on a monthly basis - at least to understand how those extra 5 secs of waiting time can harm your entire business. 

Inbound sales

You don’t always know who is calling you right now. Yes, you can gather customer data in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, integrate it with your contact center solution and make your agents see customer information before each call on a customer card via a screen pop feature, but what if the phone number of an inbound caller isn’t familiar to your business? Yes, you can check Caller ID, but if this person calls for the first time, you don’t yet know the purpose of that call. 

Why are we explaining all this? Well, firstly, you have to understand that some of such people who are calling for the first time are your soon-to-be customers. And what if those soon-to-be customers will be put in lengthy call queues? Obviously, they will never buy anything from you, never be put in your customer base, and never bring your extra money - and what is the most unpleasant thing about it is that you lose people who are already ready to buy. No long lead management practices, no sales qualification, no dozens of cold calling attempts - come and get it. But what is an unbeatable barrier between you and your new customers? That awful long call center queue. 

Brand advocacy and customer loyalty

Where is the connection between the call center queue and brand advocacy? It isn’t as simple as you could think. One long call center queue that was experienced by your current customer and ruined his or her day can make this customer come back home, go out with friends and say something like: “Hey, never buy anything from X company! There is no way to contact with them, looks like they put people in a call center queue forever!”. It is an awful trigger - if there is no way to contact you, and you do nothing about building communication between the brand and clients, what to do if, for example, a prospective customer buys a product, something goes wrong, and what is the way out? No one wants to spend hours of effort to reach out to a company in case of a need - it is unnecessary, especially if take into account how competitive the modern business world is. You can’t provide a consistent customer experience? No problem, someone else will do it. If you get the reputation of a company that doesn’t show any customer care and does nothing about customer service quality improvement, you will lose most of your potential customers even before you will reach out to them. That is why proper call center queue management is vital, even more vital than you thought about it before. 

Best practices to reduce call center queue wait times

IVR callback - offer a callback option for those clients who can’t wait in the call center queue due to any reason;

Estimated waiting time notification - remind callers in the call center queue about the estimated wait time and their position in the call center queue;

Intelligent call routing - use different call routing modes to make sure that the average time in a queue will be reduced;

Service level monitoring - use real-time dashboards to make sure that agents answer all calls in accordance with pre-set average speed of answer KPIs;

Call scripting - provide agents with proper call scripts to reduce average call duration and average handling time (Average Handle Time), and respectively, average call queue time;

Call monitoring - listen to real-time conversations to make sure that agents do everything as needed;

Agent training - train agents properly to teach them to handle calls faster and avoid wasting time on unneeded activities, pay closer attention to After Call Work, as agents often spend too much time on it;

Reduce call transfer and on-hold times - your goal is to make sure that no call transfers are happening due to poor call routing settings or lack of agent skills. Agents have to be provided with a comprehensive internal knowledge base and call scripts to decrease the average hold times, which can frustrate customers. 

Workforce management - make sure that during your peak business hours (peak call times) there are enough qualified agents to deal with inbound call volumes and provide acceptable customer wait times. 

Conclusion

Call center queuing is one of the most significant call center operations regarding the quality of customer service and customer retention. Call center queuing means the management of a phone queue (call center queue) to reduce the average wait time in a phone queue. This can be achieved by using many call center queuing practices and techniques, such as offering IVR callbacks, agent training, and proper call routing. Call center queuing is impossible to manage without call queue software, and such call queue software for call center queuing is available with the cloud-contact center software. Call queuing is performed by setting up proper IVR system and ACD (Automatic Call Distributors) software for intelligent call routing, and also you can manage call center queuing by managing statistics and reports from the ACD system. 

If you are interested in a call queuing system that will eliminate abandoned calls, reduce average call queue times and boost customer satisfaction, you definitely should consider VoipTime Cloud contact center as an option.