Netcall: British Queues Growing Keith Dawson 10/06/2006 10:15 AM EST URL: http://www.callcentermagazine.com/shared/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=193105082 Cambridge, England-based call center technology firm Netcall says queues are getting longer in the U.K. The firm's research analyzed a sample of more than 2 million queued calls across seven industries in the first half of 2006. The Netcall report says callers wait slightly longer than 12 minutes during busy times. The average rose from January (11 minutes) to June (15 minutes) during busy times. Longest wait times occurred in the Government, health and retail sectors -- as long as a half an hour at worst. Utilities companies had wait times of 20 minutes and financial services firms were about the same. The shortest average wait time during busy periods came from -- and this may surprise most readers -- phone, internet, and travel companies: six to nine minutes, again during the busiest times. According to a survey by Gfk NOP and the Sunday Mail, people in the U.K. spend as much as 45 hours per year on hold. If that sounds outrageous, keep in mind, this is "up to" 45 hours. Netcall's Technical Principal Richard Farrell commented on his firm's research:"Given that the average Briton currently spends many hours waiting on-hold every year, it is not surprising that traditional queue handling -- whether music or messaging, is becoming increasingly unpopular. When you take into consideration that one bad customer service experience is often all it takes for a caller to switch suppliers, reducing call waiting times should be regarded as critical for organizations." Naturally, Netcall has a solution. The firm makes "virtual queuing" technology, which allows callers to get call centers to call them back instead of waiting on hold. The product is called QueueBuster. ICMI's Greg Levin covered virtual queuing technology in the North American market for the October issue of Call Center Magazine in an article called "The Viability of Virtual Queuing Tools." Levin described the way most systems work: When a customer calls, the system -- which is embedded in the call center's IVR unit -- announces the estimated wait time (EWT) and offers callers, typically, three options: 1) to continue holding; 2) to hang up and receive a callback when the next agent is available; or 3) receive a callback at a later time or even another day -- as requested by the caller. Callers that choose the second option are asked to enter their phone number and state their name, then are told that, after they hang up, the system will keep their place in queue and call them back. But Netcall's research is also an excellent argument for Web and phone-based self-service technologies, not to mention better agent scheduling and workforce management.