I always thought that “We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes” just meant “We are experiencing normal call volumes and we underinvest in customer service.”
I don’t remember the last time I called Air Canada Aeroplan where the hold time wasn’t at least an hour. One of the best things about status is jumping to the top of the queues so that my time isn’t wasted. Although that isn’t always a help. During the pandemic Delta Air Lines hold times got up to 41 hours for Diamond members.
It turns out, though, that some companies make customers wait on hold even when they have phone reps available?
It’s lower cost to get customers to do self-service online, whether making transactions on a company’s website or looking up information themselves. But if you make it too easy to get customer service by phone, customers won’t do that.
HP had added 15 minute holds as a requirement to get phone service for PC and printer customers.
At the beginning of a call to telephone support, a message will be played stating: “We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience. The next available representative will be with you in about 15 minutes.
“To quickly resolve your issue, please visit our website support.hp.com to check out other support options or find helpful articles and assistant to get a guided help by visiting virtualagent.hpcloud.hp.com.”
…”The wait time for each customer is set to 15 minutes – notice the expected wait time is mentioned only in the beginning of the call.” The message will be read out three times during the wait time, after the initial reading.
The reason for the change? Getting people to figure it out themselves using online support. As HP put it: “Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve,” and “taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies.”
Leaked documents about the change embarrassed HP, and forced them to reverse course. After years of long hold times, though, Aeroplan’s holds haven’t really sped up sadly.
Sometimes call volumes are higher than normal – bad weather events cancelling flights – airlines don’t do even more to boost call center capacity during these events because it’s costly, as well.