In this day and age, customer service is so important that it can almost make or break a business. An increasing amount of customers can be swayed to switch services or providers simply because of long hold times, and bad support experience. Even with email and online support, it seems the easiest and quickest way to get a hold of a live person is with a simple phone call. At least in theory, but anyone that’s had to make a customer service call probably has a horror story to share. Instead of a helpful human on the other end, customer service calls are often associated with outdated and automated menus, and when you finally manage to break through, there is a 15 minute hold period filled with the same monotonous elevator music.
When it comes to business VoIP providers, it’s incredibly important to know you can attain customer support at a moment’s notice. If the business phone service for an entire company goes down, it is crucial the provider can be reached – and quickly. Sitting on hold for 30 minutes while productivity halts because no one can make or receive phone calls could prove to be dire. So we were curious to find out which VoIP providers kept you on hold the longest. We assembled a list of nine of the most popular providers. We then called each provider three times a day, for two weeks straight Monday thru Friday. Calls were placed between 9 to 11 a.m., 12 to 3 p.m. and again from 4 to 7 p.m. in order to gauge morning, afternoon and night support.
Each provider had an easy to understand menu to guide callers between sales, or varying types of support like technical help or billing. During each call, most of the providers we called would ask for an account or telephone number related to your account so that agents can pull up your information as soon as the call begins. However, only Jive Communications and ShoreTel gave the option to leave a voicemail, with ShoreTel doing so right away and Jive after you wait on hold for 1 minute. Vonage Business, however, did not have any such features. Instead, hold music was interrupted only be reminders to check the Vonage Business support website.
