If you could solve your customers’ biggest pet peeve, would you? Particularly if the solution was relatively low-cost? It’s nice to think that every contact center would. The question becomes, what IS your customers’ biggest pet peeve?

If you believe the research, when it comes to interacting with companies, customers hate being left on hold the most. Time is money, as the old saying goes, and customers resent the implication that your company’s time and money are more valuable than theirs. When you put them on hold, you’re saying, “We don’t care enough to put the necessary resources in place to serve you.” What was once an annoyance is now interpreted as a statement on your part, and customers don’t like it…no matter how many times you tell them you value their business in recorded messages.

Research from Virtual Hold Technology (News - Alert) found that more than two-thirds of customers (64 percent) will hang up if a company forces them to wait more than five minutes on hold. This number jumps to 91 percent if customers area forced to wait over 10 minutes. It may seem like a small amount of time to you, but in 10 minutes you could lose nearly all of your potential and existing customers. See the problem?

This challenge is one of the many hurdles that hosted contact center solutions are helping to overcome. Hosted and cloud-based solutions, as they proliferate and solutions providers add new features to try and stand out, are allowing many small to medium-sized contact centers offer their customers capabilities that were only possible for the largest of companies to offer 10 years ago. Callbacks, or the ability to allow customers to hold their place in a queue without waiting on the phone, are one of those features.

“Call back services, offer customers the option to receive a call back from the next available customer service agent instead of waiting on phone,” wrote Win the Customer’s Flavio Martins in a recent blog post. “Not only is the experience improved for customers who no longer need to waste time over the phone or have to be re-routed to appropriate departments, but call backs allow the most appropriate customer service agent to handle the customer’s inquiry.”

Hosted contact center platform solutions providers such as Five9 (News - Alert) offer agent callback and Web callback features, which allow customers to schedule time to receive a callback from an agent. It’s an easy and low-cost way to eliminate customers’ biggest pet peeve, while at the same time smoothing out sudden call spikes in the contact center, which can help organizations stick to their schedules and maintain adherence…and keep their customers.