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Why Spend So Much Getting Customers to Call, Only to Put Them On Hold?

How much of your life do you spend on hold? An uncomfortable study commissioned last year by text-message service TalkTo concluded that the average American spends about 13 hours on hold each year. Overall, given the average life span, this means most Americans will shuffle off their mortal coils having spent a total of 43 days on hold waiting for customer service.

Nobody likes to wait on hold. Most reasonable people, however, understand that it’s necessary under some circumstances. If you’re calling a utility company after a storm, for example, it’s not hard to realize that many others will also be doing so. On the other hand, being put on hold for an excessive amount of time when you’re calling on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in response to an ad is fairly unforgiveable…particularly if you’re being told the entire time how much the company values your business.

A recent infographic highlighted by Business2Community’s Flavio Martins reveals that companies today are spending 94 percent of their marketing budgets persuading customer calls, but only six percent of their budgets in actually handling their calls. This is generally the source of the ridiculous disconnect between the type of effort most companies appear to put in to attract customers, and the lukewarm effort they expend to service that customer. Customers today are more demanding and aware of having their time wasted than ever: if the average customer spends too long on hold, more than one-third will hang up and never call back. In that moment, your company has been written off as incompetent and irrelevant.

For starters, obviously, this means that a company looking to attract and hold customers must have resources in place to ensure that they are able to handle all customer calls in under a minute most of the time. For cases when they cannot, it’s important to approach putting customers on hold the right way.

According to the infographic, only 12 percent of callers on hold will stay on the line if they hear silence during the process. More than two-thirds (68 percent) will remain on hold if they hear relevant information during that time. While the infographic was created to push on-hold messaging solutions that educate callers during hold times (rather than playing bad music, for example), Martins writes that the data also indicate that callback solutions are of high value: customers can ask for an agent to call them back when one becomes available.

Whichever method you choose, it’s important to recognize how ludicrous it is to spend nearly all your marketing resources getting customers to call, only to stick them on hold when you’ve succeeded. 


Edited by Rory J. Thompson