Many contact centers are grappling with labor shortages, surging workloads, or a brutal combination of both. The resource mismatches have resulted in long wait times and frustration for customers, and high occupancy and burnout for agents. More serious implications can include employee turnover, lost customers, and a hit to your organization’s reputation and results.

We’ve been getting lots and lots of inquiries about the use and effectiveness of virtual queuing. Virtual queue technologies enable customers to hang up and receive a return call without losing their place in the queue. For customers, this prevents the need to leave a voicemail or to wait on hold. For agents, there’s little difference between an inbound call and a callback — the system places outbound calls and delivers connected calls to agents, much like inbound calls.

How well virtual queuing works depends on the willingness and availability of customers to take callbacks and the resource capacity of the center to handle the calls. It can be especially useful in organizations influenced by weather, service outages, and other factors beyond their control. Used in the right way and for the right reasons, virtual queuing technologies can be a big help, both internally and with customer experience. Read more.

Continue reading the article “The Pros and Cons of Virtual Queues” by Brad Cleveland, published by ICMI.