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What is the calculation for the Average wait time?



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Shannon Anahata

Zendesk Product Manager

Edited Oct 04, 2024


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15 comments

When will the average wait time message be available in other languages? It does not make much sense that all the other Talk options are offered in all supported languages, but this one is only in English.

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Hi Zendesk team/ Shannon,

I saw the discussion earlier about creating Average wait times metric per group. May I know as of know has it been available?

I checked the current wordings in this article and it says "The Average wait time metric calculates all calls.." , does it mean it calculates all calls routed to all groups, or just in one single group?

Let's say in 1 phone number there are routing options to 2 Groups A and B. If Group Customer Support A is busy with pending calls and high wait time, while Group Customer Support B is completely free with no calls, when someone connects to Group B on the same number, will they hear the Average Wait time message too? Or only those who connect to Group A?

Appreciate your prompt response

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The time customer hear is not realistic as it includes the abandoned calls. The customer will always hear a much lower time than that’s actually true.

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Hello, why is our average wait time announcement always 8 minutes max? We have had a very busy year thus far and there are days where we're hitting 25+minutes in wait time. This is VERY irritating to our customers who think they'll only have to wait 8 minutes for someone to talk to them but actually wait so long they've just wasted their lunch break. 

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

@Benny,
 
Average wait time message calculates the wait time on a 24 hour period. This means even though one particular call may have waited for 25 minutes, the overall average wait time for the number is still around 8 minutes for that particular day.

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Dane  Thank you for your response. I hope Zendesk knows how ridiculous this metric is, and how useless it is, and how aggravating it is to us clients, as well as our customers. First of all, if you tell us on our live dashboard that the current wait time is 25 minutes, that's the true wait time, and that's what the customer should hear. There's no rationalizing that. Secondly, there's no value in calculating a non-business hour, and things should be configurable enough that we can checkmark what our hours are so that it includes or excludes a zero-wait time at 4am when we're closed.

I still haven't received a true response for why our callers hear 8 minutes as the max. 8 minutes would only make sense (according to Zendesk logic) if for that 24 hour period thus far, the average was taken down to 8 minutes max. I ran the numbers for 2/3/22, when we had our highest call volume with majority of customers having close to 20 minute wait time on average (according to your query's wait time metric for those hours). If I look at the wait time for the entire day of our business hours, the average wait time is 19.8 minutes! Not 8 minutes.  Even if I pretend we had 200 calls from midnight to 9pm, and each were only 0.1 minutes of wait time, the total average wait time for those fake 200 calls plus our real ones still is 16.7 minutes. Not the 8 minutes our callers are being told. Our callers are being told by Zendesk that their wait time is half of what it really is. And we're the ones who then have to deal with the irate customers. This should be resolved ASAP. It's not a nice-to-have, its a deficiency and inaccuracy in your current process. 

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

@Benny,
 
We appreciate the feedback regarding the average wait time message. I have already marked this as an official feedback and will be reviewed by our Product Managers.
 
Regarding the 8 minutes maximum message for average wait time, it also uses the 24 hour average call wait time. Furthermore, it does not have a set limit. You can verify it be creating a Talk Dataset Query using the metric Call Wait Time.
 

 
With this simple report you can breakdown your average wait time for the 24 hour period. If you have discovered that there is a different message that was provided in the message compared to your report. Feel free to submit a ticket and we'll look into it directly. 

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Ditto on wanting to see an Average Wait Time for business hours, or to the Talk Schedule, re: Objects & Rules, Schedules. Does anyone know a way?

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Hi Myron, does this product feedback thread capture what you're looking for? If so (or if it's close), I'd suggest upvoting it and adding a comment with information about your use case -- thanks! Enable different greetings for different times of the schedule

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I've just had an escalation call with one of our clients who absolutely hates the "average wait time" feature because it's rarely accurate during peak times and because it doesn't provide any updates throughout the wait. I would love to see a more accurate average wait time be added and/or for the phone system to provide updates throughout the wait.

Another great feature would be to prompt the caller to leave a message every so often so that if they no longer want to wait, they know what to press. I've advised that they just need to press 1 to get routed to voice mail but they often don't remember that if they've been waiting for 30+ minutes and still haven't had their call answered.

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Chelsea,
 
This is definitely a good feature to have. Would you mind posting your use case to our Feedback on Talk topic? We have a template you can copy and use in your post. Thanks!

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What are the common reasons for a call to have an average wait time of 00:00:00? These calls have a handle time, duration, wrap up time, etc, but the wait time is 0. Aside from someone answering the call before it enters the queue, excluding abandoned calls, why would a call have a wait time of 0? 

 

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Our callers are being told the average wait time is 2 minutes, when in fact it is over 20 minutes.  This is happening to our priority customers.  How do we correct this to have the actual average wait time quoted?

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Arianne Batiles

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Nick Blauvelt,

The Average wait time metric calculates all calls that passed the initial greeting and averages those times throughout the day. I can't conclude any reason at this time other than your agents may all have been online during the specific period and answered the call in under a minute. 

May I know the average wait time you see under the Overview table? You may also create an Explore report using the metric Call wait time and add the ticket ID as an attribute to see which calls have a call wait time of zero. 

 

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Arianne Batiles

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Kym Valenzuela,

Unfortunately, it's not possible to change the average wait time in the greeting as of this time. 

The Average wait time metric calculates all calls that passed the initial greeting and averages those times throughout a 24-hour period. If you wish to see the data on inbound calls by wait time, you may follow this recipe: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838623002-Explore-recipe-Inbound-calls-by-wait-time.
 

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