How Long Hold Times Affect Your Customers’ Experience (and Your Bottom Line)

What if, even though you were ready to read this introduction, you were asked to wait for a minute? What if you had to wait two minutes? You’d be frustrated, right? Or even worse, you might give up completely.

Hold times are a disruption. For customers, hold times can be an infuriating part of trying to contact a company, whether they want to have a simple question answered or a major issue resolved. For agents, hold times can be a stressful necessity that leads to friction-filled first impressions and customer annoyances that are hard to recover from.

That being said, hold times aren’t going anywhere. There’s always going to be an ebb and flow of contact center needs that is mitigated by asking customers to wait. Still, the question is, what does that mean for your business and how can you handle holds better?