Largely because of the influence of social media as a customer service channel, today’s consumer expects an instantaneous response to his questions or complaints. That sense of urgency has transferred to other channels, requiring companies to have the right staff, the right strategies, and the right technologies in place to respond to customers in a matter of minutes, if not sooner, no matter what the contact medium might be.

Customers who use the phone, of course, expect an immediate response. They have no patience for waiting 20 minutes to speak to a contact center agent or for navigating a never-ending sea of interactive voice response (IVR) system prompts. The endless drone of Muzak can really get under their skin.

Despite contact centers’ best efforts, hold times are an inevitable part of the customer service experience, especially when call volumes are abnormally high.

An early thought might be to hire more contact center agents or offload the excess call volume to a contact center outsourcer. Either option will result in additional and ongoing costs and the loss of valuable time spent hiring and training these new agents.

British telephone carrier EE is exploring another option—concierged customer service, which it launched in August under the Priority Answer moniker. With Priority Answer, some customers pay a little extra to get through to customer service representatives a little faster.

In essence, the carrier is creating a two-tiered customer service system. The first tier is for ordinary customers who are required to wait the usual amount of time—anywhere from a few seconds to two or three minutes, depending on the time of day—to speak with an agent. The second is for customers who agree to pay an extra 50 pence (or 80 cents) to be fast-tracked to speak to the next available agent instead of having to wait in the queue.

EE has stated publicly that it intends to answer all customer calls as quickly as possible. 

EE isn’t the first phone company to offer customers the option to pay for priority service. In the United States, AT&T in 2012 introduced a similar program, called AT&T Plus, but ended it in March 2013 after a year-long pilot in several states. Sprint and Verizon piloted similar programs, which they, too, have since discontinued.

Airlines, financial services firms, utilities, and technology companies have introduced similar programs—all with mixed results and various degrees of acceptance.

“The American egalitarian ideal would have many people…chafing at being charged to be treated specially,” observes Ian Jacobs, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “We like to see customer service as something built into the price of the product or service we’re buying. Many Americans would avoid a company that charged for special service.” 

EE maintained in a statement that its aim is to set a new standard in customer service. Customers, however, weren’t buying it. Many took to social media almost immediately to voice their outrage at the service offering, which they stated gives some customers an unfair preference over others.

It’s a valid complaint. “Every customer is important and has the right to speak to an agent,” says Bruce Pollock, vice president of strategic growth and planning at West Interactive, a provider of contact center solutions and services. 

“Showing favoritism to folks who pay more is always a bad idea, even if it is a small amount,” Dan Miller, founder and principal analyst at Opus Research, says. 

Keith Dawson, practice leader of Ovum’s customer interaction team, states EE’s foray into this area is more of “a marketing gimmick,” one that is “not designed to have much impact on service, but is designed to get attention.”

And at the equivalent of 80 cents per call, “it’s not likely to generate much revenue or mitigate the costs of a service call,” he adds.

The program is also going to be tough to manage, particularly as more callers become aware of it, according to Miller. “EE might find it difficult to assure callers that they can save time,” he says, “because it is very hard to predict how many people might want to jump to the front of the queue at the same time or how long the person who is currently in touch with an agent is going to stay on the line.”

Dawson has similar concerns: “Let’s say it becomes really popular,” he says. “Then they’ve managed to unbalance their ability to forecast volume [and] schedule reps, and they likely will have to spend as much to compensate [the agents] as they reap from the service fee.”

An additional concern when offering such a program is that the level of service must be such that customers will pay extra for it. Charging customers a premium for the same lousy service that others receive for free will surely backfire.

Concierged service is “a Band-Aid, when companies should be fixing customer service across the board for everyone,” says Nancy Jamison, a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Alternatives Exist

Companies would be better served by having enough agents to handle their call volumes and then providing those agents with the right tools and technologies to do their jobs well, according to Jamison.

“It’s more a matter of careful planning, scheduling, and optimizing your existing resources,” says Paul Stockford, chief analyst at Saddletree Research. “It’s more about efficiently scheduling agents.”

Stockford, therefore, advocates for much greater use of workforce management solutions in the contact center space. “Currently about 80 percent of the workforce management solutions out in the market are being underutilized,” he states. “I would look toward proven solutions like these to improve scheduling rather than introducing new services [such as pay for support].”

But even under the best circumstances, the need to place customers on hold is sometimes inevitable. When that happens, “various virtual hold technologies can reduce the time customers have to spend waiting around,” Dawson points out.

With the callback option, for example, callers on hold can schedule a callback without losing their place in the queue. They enter their name and phone number into the system and can hang up. Virtual placeholders keep their places in line and maintain first-in, first-out call treatment. 

More advanced systems allow callers on hold to schedule callbacks at times that are more convenient for them if they don’t feel like waiting.

Callback solutions can be triggered automatically when certain thresholds are reached for average wait time, the number of people in the queue, service levels, or call abandonment rates, for example.

Genesys, which earlier this year launched a callback offering developed with Virtual Hold Technology, says its solution has led to a 35 percent average reduction in speed of answer, a 25 percent average improvement in service levels during peak periods, and a 40 percent reduction in abandoned calls.

Build a Better IVR

Modern customer service phone interactions almost always involve an IVR of some sort. The technology has been around for decades, yet even today there are many poorly designed IVRs that needlessly waste customers’ time. Systems require customers to press and repress keys, speak to a machine that misunderstands most of their responses, and navigate complicated and seemingly endless menus that lead to nowhere. Frustrated customers now know that they can usually hit zero or say “operator” to get to a live person and skip the menu maze, but companies can take steps to speed up the interaction.

First and foremost, when it comes to the IVR, less is more. Too often, IVRs become a tangled mess of menu options that take too long to follow. Companies need to reduce the number of options and keep them as brief and simple as possible.

Next, they can enable barge-in for experienced callers who know exactly what they want to do and where to find it within the system prompts. Don’t force these callers to listen to the same menu options every time they call in. Let them interrupt the system and quickly navigate through prompts to get where they want to go on their own.

One of the most frustrating things for callers—which still happens very often, according to analysts—is the need to repeat information at different stages during the interaction. How often does a customer enter her account number into an automated system, only to have to retell the agent that same number again? 

“I’d also suggest reducing the number of transfers through better data capture at the front end of a call,” Dawson says. 

A company can also give callers a reverse option, which enables callers to retrace their steps if they enter the wrong menu path. No one who has gotten five layers deep into an IVR wants to hang up and start all over again. 

Jamison also recommends a natural language speech interface to quicken the pace of interactions with company IVRs. “You can flatten menus and speed callers to the right destination within the company,” she says.

Natural language processing is a rapidly growing business, expected to climb from its current value of $3.79 billion to $9.86 billion by 2018, a growth rate of 21 percent, according to ReportsnReports.

The analyst firm concluded that the heightened interest in natural language processing is being driven largely by industry demands to improve customer experiences and the continued popularity of smartphones, which come bundled with speech recognition software. 

Natural language, West Interactive’s Pollock adds, “is particularly beneficial for callers who know what they want to do.”

At TalkTalk, another U.K. provider of phone and Internet services, the introduction of Nuance Communications’ Natural Language Call Steering solution to its IVR resulted in an average reduction in call time of 26 seconds, with some customer calls reduced by more than two minutes; a 16 percent reduction in misrouted calls; and a 28 percent increase in customer self-service. That led to savings of more than $4.8 million in just three months.

Previously, TalkTalk customers were required to listen and respond to a series of phone menus with lengthy prompts that unnecessarily extended the calls. With Call Steering, callers are presented with a “What can we help you with today?” prompt, to which they can respond naturally using their own words. The system recognizes caller intent and quickly routes each call to the appropriate agent or self-service asset based on hundreds of unique call paths, something that would be impossible to do quickly or accurately with menu trees.

Eoin Power, head of contact strategy and planning at TalkTalk, said in a statement that the solution enables his company “to handle incoming calls in the most efficient manner, to make the experience as fast and convenient as possible for customers.”

Grueling and time-consuming steps in the IVR can be further reduced with visual IVR technology that maps out the steps of the customer service interaction in a graphical interface and lets customers simply tap their way through the interaction, rather than waiting to hear all of the options in lengthy recorded menus.

Visual IVR technology can have other uses as well. “The most interesting developments [involve] making smartphone apps capable of carrying out more tasks on their owners’ behalf, including a visual presentation of options that are consistent with information and capabilities provided through the IVR, Web chat, or by talking with an agent,” Miller says. “The idea is to provide customers with visibility into the length of the queue, should they want to talk to an agent, but also showing all the things they can carry out through the Web app or e-commerce site.”

Companies can also turn to predictive “menuing” to cut the amount of time that customers spend on the line prior to reaching an agent, according to Pollock. This involves integrating inbound and outbound communications, “so that you’re not serving up the full normal menu if you can guess the reason for the call ahead of time,” he says.

If, for example, a company sent an overdue bill notice to a customer and he calls four days later, it’s a safe bet that he’s calling to settle his account, Pollock says. The same can apply after a company has initially reached out to a customer with some marketing materials. 

Along with that, Kate Leggett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, suggests that companies employ predictive analytics together with caller analytics to help match the agent to the customer and his particular concern before routing the call. For a 25-year-old hipster living in San Francisco with a highly technical problem, a 60-year-old woman in the Midwest might not be the best agent, she says.

“You can definitely match the customer’s personality to that of the agent,” Leggett says. “A similar agent has a much easier time understanding the customer and relating quickly to his particular situation.”

Faster with Voice Security

The lengths to which customers have to go to prove their identity before gaining access to their accounts is another source of frustration. Typical interactions start with passwords and PINs and follow through a series of intrusive and time-consuming security questions, then lead to even more frustration when customers can’t remember the names of their favorite childhood pets or their first-grade teachers. 

Voice biometrics can speed interactions along, eliminating the need for customers to go through a lengthy authentication process with the agent at the start of an interaction, according to Pollock.

With the new generation of voice biometrics, calls are silently screened in real time, and no additional questions are required to match voiceprints. Agents and callers proceed normally through the interaction until the system completes the verification and then quietly sends the agent a cue that it is OK to proceed. 

According to analyst firm Contact Babel, most call centers currently take up to 60 seconds to verify the identity of each customer. Many of the voice authentication solutions on the market today can do it in about 15 or 20 seconds, shaving as much as 45 seconds off the average call handling time.

“Voice biometrics is a great way to speed up the interaction, getting the customer to the dialogue faster,” Leggett says.

Still, while getting customers through a phone call quickly is a desirable goal, analysts caution against relying too heavily on it alone. “The industry is taking a huge step backward in just trying to get people on and off the phone quicker,” Stockford states. “The whole industry is moving toward the customer experience. Metrics like first contact resolution are replacing average handling time.”

Companies such as EE, he adds, “are taking a reverse view of where the market is going. Everyone else is talking about improving the overall customer experience and the customer journey.”

Jamison says it all comes back to the basics. “We know that consumers prefer self-service, but they will still call, and when they do, they have more sophisticated problems or questions,” she states. “Giving them a faster call queue misses the point. Give the agents the right tools to help them and get them the right answers.”

“Proactively push out the right data to the agent at the right time in the interaction so she can get it to the customer faster,” Leggett says. “That’s what really makes the biggest difference.” 

News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.