This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
Every company that makes me wait on hold also has a recorded voice that says my call is important. If it were, they would offer to call me back.
The technology exists. Many customer service systems can hold your place in line and ring you when an agent is free. Some companies already offer it, and it is wonderful: you press a button, hang up and go on with your day. The rest still leave you listening to the same eight bars of music while you try to remember what you were doing.
Callbacks are what people say they want
Take the numbers with a grain of salt, because they come from a company that sells phone systems. In a survey of U.S. adults, Nextiva reported that 75% would rather get a callback than stay on hold, especially when the wait runs past five minutes. The same write-up says 28% of Americans have stopped doing business with a company because of long hold times. The page does not give the survey’s sample size, and its hold-time figures are not consistent, so I would not lean on any single percentage.
But you do not need a survey to see the point. Nobody enjoys sitting beside a phone for twenty minutes. A callback gives that time back.
What a decent system would do
- Offer the callback up front. Not after ten minutes of waiting, and not buried in a menu.
- Keep your place in line. A callback that puts you at the back is just a delay with extra steps.
- Tell me the real wait. “Your wait is about 12 minutes” beats “your call is important.”
- Call from a number I can recognize. Otherwise I will let it go to voicemail, and we are back to square one.
- Try twice, then leave a message. And let me reschedule with one tap.
The reason companies don’t
I suspect part of the answer is that hold queues are cheap and quiet. A long line does not show up as an angry email, and some customers give up before they reach a person. That is good for a cost spreadsheet, and bad for everyone who actually needed help.
Companies that already promise “we value your time” can prove it. Give people a callback option. It is a small feature, and it is the one customers would notice.
If you have been burned by a callback that never came, you are not wrong to be wary. That is a reason to build them better, not to skip them. And while we are at it, a “talk to a person” button on every chatbot would help, too.
More on Contoh
- Every Customer Service Chatbot Needs a “Talk to a Person” Button
- Give Me a Real Delivery Time, Not an All-Day Window
- Unsubscribing Should Take One Click and One Day