July 31, 2019 | Last Updated on: June 28, 2023
Putting customers on hold is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make nowadays, and the longer the wait, the more your reputation will suffer. You don’t want your company being tagged in angry customer services complaints on social media or showing up on On Hold With, the public-shaming site for companies that subject their customers to endless wait times. And the worst thing that can happen is you lose your customers to your competition because they don’t have any wait times. To get around this issue, try using a callback service instead.
Long hold times can cost you your reputation, but it’s also hard very expensive to have enough people just waiting around to answer phone calls during those random high volume periods. So what’s a small business owner to do?
The best thing you can do to reduce the amount of time your customers are spending on hold and their aggravation with your company is to use a callback service.
4) Improves customer experience 5) Improves company reputation 6) Reduces cost per call (lower abandon rates, handle times, and telco costs) This article will outline 5 of the top callback services for small businesses available today so you can easily improve your customers’ experience and your business reputation.
Fonolo is a popular cloud-based callback service provider with service options that are well suited to the small business owner.
Fonolo hooks into whatever existing call center infrastructure your business is already using so there is minimal impact on your business processes. It does this by offering your callers the ability to opt into a callback queue when hold times are too long.
When your caller chooses a callback, Fonolo’s audio prompt confirms the customers phone number and then connects to your call center, navigates through your caller prompts, and waits on hold until an agent answers. Once an agent is on the line, Fonolo calls the customer back and connects them with the agent.
This process looks exactly like a normal inbound call to the call center agent but saves your customer the extended wait time and frustration.
Fonolo does not offer public pricing information but provides custom quotes based on your business needs.
Founded in 1995, Virtual Hold is a popular callback service that is known for making both callers and call center agents happier with the call experience. It does this by enabling agents to have as much time as necessary to address each customer query while reducing the mental load of juggling call information for multiple calls.
Virtual Hold’s technology collects user data from the call, stores it, and attaches it to the callback so the call center agent is able to quickly catch up on all the information relevant to each and every call. Virtual Hold focuses heavily on improving customer experience, and produces whitepapers and blog posts on what businesses like yours need to know about callback and customer relationships.
Virtual Hold claims to have reduced abandonment rates for their customers by 50 percent and is the callback service for bands like Comcast, PayPal, and Delta. They do not offer public pricing information but will provide your business with a custom quote, based on the features and services your business needs.
CloudTalk is another customer call management service; it registers all unanswered or abandoned calls as needing a callback. It logs the missed call and redials the missed call’s phone number when a customer service representative is available. If the caller is not available to speak to an agent at that moment, CloudTalk keeps trying until it’s able to connect the customer and the agent or it times out according to your preferences.
The first callback with CloudTalk happens as soon as an agent is available, the second one an hour later, and all subsequent attempts are made at intervals set by you for as long as you wish to keep trying to reach the customer. CloudTalk allows you to limit your callbacks to during business hours, which is helpful if you’re a B2B business, or to include evenings and weekends on your callback schedule.
Because CloudTalk logs all the relevant information from an unanswered or abandoned phone call and every subsequent attempt, it’s easy to pass the query from one customer support agent to another and ensure your customers are getting great customer service no matter how many different people have been looped into the callback process.
CloudTalk’s plans range from 29€ per month to 329 € per month, depending on several variables, including how many agents you need and whether you pay monthly or annually.
If you’re already using Zendesk to manage customer support tickets on your website, good news: You don’t have to have a separate callback service, and can choose to integrate Zendesk Talk into your current system for handling customer queries. All of the customer history will be in one spot and easily accessible whether they choose to call or message your business.
Like most callback services, Zendesk Talk offers Interactive Voice Routing (IVR) technology, automatic ticket creation, voicemail transcription, call recording, and real-time queue monitoring to ensure your customer’s time isn’t wasted listing to bad hold music.
Zendesk Talk offers a free trial (the time frame varies) and plans ranging from $0 to $89 per agent per month, depending on how complex your phone system needs to be. As the only callback service on this list offering a free trial, if you’ve been toying with the idea of implementing a callback option but aren’t fully committed, Zendesk Talk may be a good way for you to check out how you feel about callback services.
Talkdesk is a cloud-based contact center, and claims to empower companies to leverage customer experience as their competitive advantage. They actively monitor customer satisfaction through customer mood assessments and average hold times across phone calls to make sure your contact workflow is running optimally.
While many businesses focus on ensuring your customers feel good, they forget to prioritize making the process easy for your employees. Talkdesk does this by making sure their software is intuitive and configurable through clicks, not complicated code, so as your business needs grow and change, you and your employees can easily adjust the callback flow in Talkdesk.
Talkdesk integrates with several services including Google, Salesforce, Slack, and HelpScout. With a customer list that includes companies ranging from Square to IBM to HotelTonight to Dropbox, you may have been on the phone with a Talkdesk agent as a customer.
Talkdesk doesn’t offer public pricing information but provides custom quotes depending on which services and features your company needs.
