One of the main aspects of a successful people-friendly business is its excellent customer service. Ideally, you would want your customers to always be able to call your business and speak directly with a resourceful agent that would help them in a variety of instances. Unfortunately, that is not always realistic. Call agents are more often than not saturated with a high volume of calls, especially during peak hours of the day, and it often becomes very difficult to immediately answer every forwarded call.

 

However, now we have a solution to this problem due to the innovation of call queues. A call queue is an excellent tool for businesses to deliver great customer service. It allows agents to answer multiple calls in the order in which they were received and create call groups for speedy customer responses. The reason why call queues are so efficient is that when a customer calls and all the agents are busy, it prevents the caller from being sent to an automated voicemail while your customer waits on the line and listens to hold music. Then, the call queue smartly routes the call to the agent in the queue that has spent the least amount of time on the phone instead of overloading just one agent. Additionally, in order to shorten hold times, one can implement “call waiting”, which signals agents that more callers are waiting so they should wrap up their current calls in a business-like fashion in order to assist the next caller.

 

Here are some important guidelines regarding queues:

• Avoid using a call queue to make up for a lack of agents as this will result in wasting the caller’s time.
• Set up the maximum duration of a call queue before sending the caller to voicemail based on your business’ needs and peak hours.
• If the “Announce Position to Callers” feature is used, take note of how long the call queue is during peak hours. The most effective time to use this tool is when you can let callers know that they will be connected soon and not when the waiting time is long and indefinite. If that is the case, give the callers the option of pressing a number to go directly to voicemail if they do not want to wait.
• Call queues are a great tool for managing customer support calls as well as for sales departments, help desks, reservations and appointments, and so much more. Call queues allow companies to resolve customer problems as quickly as possible especially during high call volume. Show your customers that their calls really do matter!