If you’re like most of your peers, you’re on the lookout for fast and effective ways to cut expenditures in today’s cost-constrained environment. On the top of many executives’ lists – relaxing their average speed of answer (ASA) to cut back on staffing requirements. It’s an instant win for many contact center executives, but not one they exercise freely.

The prevailing belief is customers don’t want to wait on hold, so we’d better pick up the phone fast.  Companies spend significant resources to determine what ‘fast’ means to the customer, closely benchmarking their service levels with their peers. Changing their goal from 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds to 90% answered in 30 seconds becomes an agonizing decision without the right data.

So, what are customer breaking points?  Turns out there are greater tolerances for waiting time variance than often thought:

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• Customers preferences peak at 30 seconds, which seemingly indicates that they expect to wait that long, or possibly even that customers like to wait.
• Roughly between 30 and 50 seconds is when service levels impact the experience, though only marginally.
• Beyond 50 seconds the experience reaches a true impact point.

At first, that spike at 30 seconds looked counter-intuitive to me. Who wants to be on hold?  Then again, there are times when I’m not quite ready for a call, still getting my account information in hand or thinking about how I’ll explain my situation to a service rep.

Some research we conducted a few years ago showed that customers will willingly trade off 30 seconds of ASA for a 1% increase in first contact resolution rate. Coupling that data point, with the graphic above, tells us two clear things:

• ASA is a fairly minor consideration in the customer experience, unless it reaches that 50 second tipping point.
• Customers care significantly more about what happens when the phone is answered than what occurs while on hold.

How have you played with your ASA levels to save on costs?  Tell us about your experiences.

CCC members, can take a look at our B2B data and B2C data on service levels, plus customer reactions to other cost saving techniques like offshoring and reducing operation hours.

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