Issue 20: Cutting call wait time in half  July 1st 2016

As the volume on 6/6 grew our phone messaging switched to to a prompt apologizing for high call volumes and redirecting to status.fivestars.com. This was a strategy that we had pre planned in case of a big volume event. The results were remarkable. Our average time to abandon halved.

Everyone can point to “aha” moments in their career, but like all great lessons, these typically come after a lot of hard work, and often uncomfortable experiences. This is particularly true when you work in customer support. Thats why we polled some of the best support professionals about the insights that helped them raise the bar — so we can share those with you!

Comcast said it has come up with a customer "Bill of Rights" with principles including these: more training and technology for employees; fair prices for customers; being on time and minimizing wait times; enabling self-service; keeping bills simple and transparent; re-assessing policies and fees that frustrate customers; crediting customers proactively for outages and billing errors; allowing customers to end their service without a hassle; [and] measuring employees on customer satisfaction.

No need to develop and run experiments or try wild new stuff — chances are, you already have all the tools and information you need to test your hypotheses and back up your findings. This way, you can advocate for customer support using the shared language (hint: data and money) that drives positive change within your business. Here’s how.

The test was simple: I emailed each company twice and tracked how long it took them to reply (ignoring auto-responders). Then I found the average. I only emailed companies on a Monday or Tuesday morning during normal working hours (I don’t think it’s fair to expect customer support at midnight).