Customers get pissed off when the phone agent rushes through their call, giving them half-baked solutions. At the same time, agents wasting too much time on each call can increase the call minutes and get heavy on your pocket.

That’s why it’s important to determine and ensure an ideal average call handling time in your phone support services. Here, we’ll see how we do it, to achieve the right balance between customer delight and support expenses.

How average call handling time affects your phone services!

Why average call handling time is an important aspect to be considered, is pretty evident from these aspects:

1. Increase in the call handling time of each call can reduce the efficiency of the phone support services.
2. Purchased call minutes can be used up on fewer customers, causing you a burden of overages.
3. Customers want instant solutions and can get annoyed if the phone agent drags their call unnecessarily.
4. Many customers would have to wait in queue for long, causing them to complain or leave.

Recently, we were contacted by a web host who ended up paying phone overages every month to his phone support service company. He was on a monthly plan covering 3000 minutes.

As his business received only around 10 customer calls daily, he was under the assumption that the purchased minutes were adequate to cover these calls every month.

But when he got a hefty bill every month as the phone support overages, he could sense that something was amiss. Upon reviewing the monthly call stats, he could see that majority of the calls averaged about 30 minutes.

This led him to exceed the total minutes purchased, and he had to pay overages for the excess minutes. That’s when he contacted Bobcares to see how he can get a budget-friendly phone support without compromising on the quality.

See how our phone support team helps you!

How we curb the average call handling time in our phone support

In phone, we may not have full control over the pace of speech of customers. But with years of expertise handling phone support, our agents are able to prevent such call lags. We restrain the call handling time with these actions:

1. Training

An efficient and experienced phone agent can handle calls quickly and with quality. Training the agents for handling the calls well, plays a very important role in phone support services.

We provide hands-on induction training to our phone agents and assign them to clients only after strict evaluation. Our in-depth knowledge sharing system helps to ensure ongoing skill improvement.

2. KPI

Setting KPI for phone agents such that the average call handling time do not exceed a desirable duration, is a good measure to curb wastage of time.

But if the phone agents are only focused on reducing the time, they may overlook the quality of support and this idea can backfire. At Bobcares, our KPIs are properly defined and constantly monitored to avoid such mess-ups.

With individual KPIs based on client requirements, we restrain call handling times

[ See common issues resolved by our phone support team. ]

3. Monitoring

We have a dedicated quality team to check the call quality and the time taken. They review each call to figure out if the issue was handled well and whether it got prolonged unnecessarily.

When we notice unwanted hold times or too long call times, we take measures to immediately track the reason and prevent that from happening again.

4. Systems

Human effort should be assisted with efficient systems too, in order to get the best out of your phone support systems. That’s why we have custom software and internal systems to back up our phone services.

With our efficient customer record lookup systems, agent queue managing software, call routing and tracking methods, etc., agents can easily lookup the required details and balance the calls in a way that the ideal call time is not exceeded.

5. Feedback

How customers perceive the call quality, is very vital in phone services. Getting the customer feedback on a regular basis helps us to get a real time impression about the service and enables us to make corrections in a timely manner and ensure customer delight.

We have a well-defined customer feedback collection and review mechanism

With these different measures of our phone support services, we were able to derive and ensure an ideal average call handling time that could deliver budget-friendly and quality support to the web host.

Have you started providing 24 hour support service to your customers yet? Contact us to know how you can make things better for your customers.