What Is Call Wait Time in a Call Center? How to Reduce Call Wait Time?

Call centers keep on focusing on different KPIs to improve performance. The main agenda usually is to deliver better customer services in an inbound call center and increase collection or leads in an outbound call center. Experienced and well-trained agents and the best call center solution often help call centers to improve major KPIs.

In this blog post, we will share more details about one of the important call center KPIs and how to improve its value. We will talk about the call wait time.

What is the call wait time in a call center?

Some people get confused by mixing call hold time, queue time, and call wait time. Call wait time is the time spent by a customer while waiting for an agent to greet him/ her. It is the time from a call is answered to the time agent greets the customer

Usually, 20 seconds is a standard call wait time as per a global statistic.

This time may sound negligible, but it is necessary to focus on each KPI in the call center to improve overall performance.

How to reduce call wait time?

Let us share some of the top tips that can help to reduce average call wait time in your call center.

1. Define accurate IVR

IVR menus play an important role in improving multiple key performance indicators, including, call wait time. A majority of contact center solutions provide an option to define an IVR using a GUI-based web app. The call center must have an accurate IVR, which means easy to understand and have fewer options. Dialtone-based IVRs are better than the ones that accept the voice commands. It can help in reducing average call wait time.

2. Use correct ACD rule

A call center solution offers multiple amazing features and automatic call distribution (ACD) rules are one of them. The best call center solution will have multiple ACD rules such as sticky agent, skill-based call routing, etc. Selecting the right ACD can help in defining a better customer experience, as well as, it can help in reducing overall call wait time.

3. Encourage agents to show availability once they complete the previous call job

Call wrap-up can be a set of tasks that an agent performs after hanging up a call. It is also considered to be an admin task such as putting disposition message, updating a field in the contact center solution, editing a record in the CRM system, etc. The best call center solution makes sure that until agents complete this wrap-up process, they cannot show availability to take the next call and the next call will not be transferred to that agent. However, in some cases, a call center solution lets agents show their availability to take the next call while doing wrap-up jobs for the previous call. This can increase call wait time. The call centers must train agents to avoid doing this.

Call wait time is a vital KPI and can directly impact customer experience and brand value. Thus, it is necessary to focus on improving customer experience.

To improve this and many other KPIs, one of the important tools is a feature-rich and the best call center solution. We offer the best call center solution that has been benefiting hundreds of call centers for more than 13 years now. Contact us to book a free demo and know more about this contact center solution.