Call Center Call Queues

Good call center design has two basic goals:

• Keep customers from hanging up before you can answer their call.
• Keep them happy while they wait so your eventual human interaction with them is productive.

To accomplish this, you provide four things we call “P-E-E-R.”

• Progress: Your customers need to feel the on hold line is “moving.”
• Entertainment: Provide them music and useful messages while they wait and they will wait longer.
• Expectations: Your customers need to know how long they will wait until they are rewarded.
• Reward: Once your customers get a live human on the phone, they need your staff’s full attention. Your staff can’t put them back on hold to answer another call until the service or product is delivered.

Advanced call center features …

• Messages such as: “You have been holding for 2 minutes. We are escalating your call” and “There are two callers ahead of you.”
• Queue priority telephone numbers for preferred customers. Priority numbers jump to the front of the line.
• Male and female voice rotating comfort messages: “We are experiencing a high call volume.”
• Time of day/day of week call volume reports to match staffing with call volumes.
• Wall boards, calls in queue lights, and bells to alert staff to peak volumes.
• Portable phones for call overflow to managers.

Click here for a movie about call center queue indicator lights installed for a medical practice. The movie describes “critical calls in queue indication lights” as diagrammed below.

Blue = call holding over 4 minutes Red = 9 calls in queue Yellow = 6 calls in queue Green = 3 calls in queue