Nearly the entire world whines about customer support customer care's long waiting period. But not many organizations did anything substantial regarding this. Companies still have an average waiting period of 10 plus minutes before they entertain the customer.
When a customer wants to speak to your support staff about a product or service it means either she needs some info or some action from the support team. And most of the time it is urgent/important. When a customer is calling you with utmost urgency and you force her to wait endlessly and make her listen to your promos or on-hold music then it means you don’t give a damn about the customer and you are making her irritated.
Automate as many responses as you can for the customer. Take care that just for the heck of automating responses you should not route customers in a zigzag fashion (like press 1, now press 7, now press 9, now…). When a customer has chosen to speak to a customer support representative, give an option to the customer for a call back service. As soon as your support staff is free they can call back the customer and handle the query\issue.
Call back facility will make the customer feel special and will eliminate the need for the irritating waiting period. You value your customer, customer will value you back.
PS: This post was originally posted on hoodasaurabh.blogspot.com