Read our insights article, as featured in Comms Business: ‘An end to abandoned calls’

Kakapo Systems explains how virtual queues can keep hold of customers by keeping them off hold.

If your call centre is plagued by lengthy times that your customers spend on hold, then there is a high chance that customers will grow to dislike, distrust, and ultimately disengage with your brand. It is an almost universal scenario globally, where we hope to make a quick five-minute phone call to a business, only to spend hours watching the clouds crawl across the sky whilst listening to elevator music composed to evoke hopelessness.

For customers, this scenario is frustrating. But for businesses, this situation is nothing short of dire. In a world where customers are now tech savvy and unaccepting of a lesser quality of service, the way in which hold times and abandoned calls are handled is the difference between customers coming to your business, or your competitors.

Keep My Place in Queue (KMPIQ), an application developed by Kakapo Systems, solves this problem by allowing callers to leave the queue and get called back when they reach the front. This simple improvement can have a transformative effect on the inbound calling experience and makes your call centre proactive rather than reactive.

Steve Tutt, commercial director, Kakapo Systems, said, “A single abandoned call is a tragedy because in that instant the caller has nothing but contempt for the brand and that’s a hard position to rebuild from.”

In essence, KMPIQ completely eliminates abandoned calls. KMPIQ benefits a call centre in various ways:

No hold. Simple, straightforward, yet revolutionary in comparison to previous processes. KMPIQ eliminates the time in which inbound callers spend on hold by simply removing hold altogether. This is a significant change to the past, with one study highlighting that ‘the average American spends 43 days of their life on hold’. As modern customers maintain a combination of busy lifestyles and a heightened demand for greater customer service. An end to hold entirely can not only increase trust between customers and your business but show integrity and a level of respect towards their most valuable commodity, time.

Increased comfort levels for agents and callers. Whilst it goes without saying that a KMPIQ solution is a benefit to any call centre, industries such as healthcare, travel and others that receive high volumes of calls per day stand to significantly improve their customer service through the implementation of a solution such as KMPIQ. Customers are also acutely aware of hold times, with a Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report in 2020 revealing that 60 per cent of customers believe they spend too long on hold. However, it is not only from a call processing standpoint that a KMPIQ solution benefits the call centre, but a comfort level aimed towards;

a. The agents responsible for handling the large quantities of calls, giving them a safe reassurance that missed calls can be cycled back round to them later when they have the capacity to answer them.

b. The inbound calling customer, who can safely press ‘0’, request a call back and continue with their activities and routine, within the knowledge that they will be contacted upon reaching the top of the queue.

The end to abandoned calls. Abandoned calls are neither positive to the call centre agents, who have missed an opportunity, or customers, who either look for an alternative business or are forced to phone back once, or multiple times to establish a conversation. Well implemented KMPIQ solutions completely negate to prospect of abandoned calls by ensuring that every caller is given the opportunity to join the virtual call.

Original article ‘An end to abandoned calls’ featured on Comms Business, November 2022