Customer service response times

I think all of us can relate to the frustration of long customer service wait times, particularly when there’s cheesy music playing down the phone and that age old recording of “Your call is important to us, please hold..”. I know I have hung up my phone on more than one occasion, ranting about an hour of my day I’ll never get back, determined to move to an alternative provider who actually value my call and don’t leave me hanging for days on end.

With social media becoming so prevalent I find myself resorting to Twitter or Facebook to contact customer services, assuming the response time would be far quicker than waiting on hold by telephone. It turns out I was actually quite wrong as new research from CALLCARE shows that it is actually quicker to contact businesses by phone than social media! Whereas it take people nearly an hour and a half on average to get an answer on Twitter, it was possible to get through to customer service representatives by phone in under four minutes on average.

CALLCARE conducted an experiment to call and tweet the helplines of popular mobile phone networks to get an average wait time and as you would expect, each provider had very different results. I know that in my experience I have been able to contact my mobile phone provider almost instantly every time I have needed support, but for Lewis’s mobile phone provider the customer service telephone line has been terrible.

I think in future I will taking this research on board and calling our customer service telephone hot lines instead of reaching out on twitter. Alternatively I find many websites have Live Chat facilities which although often have lengthy waits, are easier to wait on hold in an open tab ready to chat when they become available.

** This is a collaborative post **