Average wait time message using current queue activity?
Is the intention of the Average Wait Time messaging to set the expectation for the customer?
We find that it can be misleading, because it uses a 24 hour period. We have a natural lull in the morning and a peak later in the day. The 24 hour average could be 3 minutes during the peak, while the average displayed in the Current queue activity could be 10x or more. The message doesn't set realistic expectations for the customer in that scenario.
Is there any plan to change which metric the messaging reports? Or allow for an administrator to select the metric the message reports? It would be a great tool in setting accurate expectations for our customers.
Thanks!
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Official comment
Hi Everyone,
To check-in on this thread.
We have the problem in our minds to fix. Though we do not have it concretely planned on the timelines yet, we do want to communicate our current thinking around this functionality.
As we are moving towards the omni-channel vision for Zendesk, we are also thinking on improving the average wait time message from an omni-channel point of view where agents answering calls may also be dealing with items from other channels such a messages and emails which can lead to changes in the waiting times.
We will update the thread when we have more details about the plans.
UPDATE (3 Nov, 2022): Unfortunately, we do not yet have any timelines to share for improving average wait time greeting in the omni-channel context. We are still working on to include calls as part of omnichannel routing experience.
Thanks
Rohan
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UPDATE (22 Feb, 2023)
Queues (complex) is something on our roadmap in 2023 so we look forward to providing the community with more information once we have the scope/requirements defined.
Thanks,
Sean -
We had the same issue and had to shut off this option. It was causing more frustration for our customers. Wish Zendesk would fix it!
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Hi Gary,
thanks for your feedback - definitely taken into account for the future, but there's no plan at the moment to change this.
As a temporary work-around with the current set-up you could potentially allocate different numbers on different times of the day, if possible, so that a more precise estimation would be offered to your customers. This of course depends on the numbers availability and how your customers get access to them. Happy to discuss further as needed.
Best regards,
Manuel -
I've had the same feedback a long time ago, but I can't find it. Maybe I didn't share it here, but in a conversation with a Product Manager or so. Anyway, this makes the feature useless for us. We also have very high morning peaks, makes the message kick in for the rest of the day, while wait times could be back at normal levels.
Different numbers also don't really help you out when you make use of IVRs. In the end people don't wait for availability for a certain number or brand, but availability in a certain group.
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As a temporary work-around with the current set-up you could potentially allocate different numbers on different times of the day, if possible, so that a more precise estimation would be offered to your customers.
I hear you Manuel, but that requires modifying our configuration in multiple ways, multiple times a day. I think that kind of administration is too costly of an endeavor for us, given that a Zendesk Admin would need to do this.
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Hi Gary,
you could associate different Schedules to different numbers and use the Routing feature.
This way you can plan your daily routing in advance just once, based on the traffic fluctuations you are experiencing. You can give it a try and see if your customers get a fairer expectation in terms of time to wait.
Manuel -
Great idea, Manuel! I'll experiment and see how that might work out. Thanks for following up again
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My pleasure - let me know how it goes!
Manuel
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Hi Gary!
I hope you are doing well! I wanted to follow up and check how things are going with the average wait time message and if you had the opportunity to test what we discussed about a few months ago.
Let me know if I can be of further help,
Best
Manuel
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When we've had a peak in calls, the message might be played during the rest of the day when in reality there's no more serious wait time. Conversely, depending on the time of day, the 24 hour average could be 6 minutes, but the current wait time could be 35 min. We have peak seasons rather than peak times of the day, so reconfiguring Zendesk to accommodate the known peaks as well as the unexpected ones would be challenging. We want to keep the average wait time message - I just wish you could define the time would recalculate more often than every 24 hours.
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This should seriously be something that Zendesk should be actively fixing. We had to turn it off because this feature lowered our satisfaction by 4% due to constantly lying and misleading the customer. This is also a known feedback issue that appears to have been around for a while (over a year) but is actively ignored and it seems they don't want to fix despite it being relatively easy considering it is already built. What I guess would be the new question is why does Zendesk actively want to have our satisfaction lowered instead of building something that would assist with customer satisfaction?
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I would like to echo Richard's feedback. Currently, due to Coronavirus, we are experiencing an uptick in volume. During this VERY sensitive time, it is practically infuriating for a client to hear "your average wait time is 2 minutes" and then they are on hold for 10 minutes. Now, as a default, I've had to remove the message altogether and our clients are just left there wondering when anyone will pick up.
I do not agree with how this "average" is determined. For our company, we operate 8 am-5 pm PST Monday-Friday but the average wait time calculation is taking into account all the hours we are not open when the wait time is "0". So even though we have been consistently in the 10 minute wait time during business hours, this average is being brought down but wait times that do not even exist in our business.
I'm very hopeful that this will get product eyes on it soon. It is detrimental to client experience and is not transparent enough to help clients make a better decision (i.e. leave a voicemail, get a callback, go to our Help Center, etc).
I would love to have any recommend workarounds in the time being. Thanks!
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Sadly Lateesha this will probably never get fixed. They have the similar things with chat where people have been requesting things for over 3 years and they never push to get them looked into. Zendesk likes to push out new features but they don't really spend time fixing/correcting/improving what is already out on the front end. They do a lot of back end stuff but they don't really focus on front end customer experience. They have over like 150k customers so the 10 - 20 up votes these get they don't really tend to focus/care.
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To continue to echo everyone's feedback, this is a useless feature that misleads customer expectations rather than sets them.
Personally, I think wait time is also subject to much greater fluctuations than queue #. It would be great if instead of telling customers the wait time, it actually just told them their queue position, which is a more finite expectation than a nebulous and changing wait time expectation.
It would be amazing if the Multibrand feature also made it possible to give this message by brand rather than individual number. A customer could call on a low-volume number for a high-volume brand and repeatedly hear a low wait time message when in actuality we have very high wait times for that brand to be services. One commenter also mentioned group which would be great, but since Multibrand is a paid feature it would be ideal if this was one of the benefits of that to set wait time by brand.
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Hello,
Is there an update on this feature request? We have been getting numerous customers of ours rightfully complaining that the "current queues expected wait time" is not correct and is misleading. The messaging in the recording states the "current average wait time," which makes it very misleading because it's not the current queue wait time, it encompasses today's wait time.
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We do hear you and we have this on our roadmap and we will be tackling it as soon as we can. We'll update again when we have a better indication of delivery dates.
Neil Weldon | Snr Director of Product
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I look forward to hearing that you've resolved this problem. We had to turn off the average wait time message because of it.
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Any update on the status of adding/updating this feature? It's disappointing that this functionality isn't available yet. We are forced to either offer a problematic (miscommunicating the wait time) user experience for our customers or one without wait times at all. We are definitely feeling the absence in our customer experience.
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Our abandoned rate is too high, but looking at the queue times on abandoned calls, we find that most people are dropping in under 5:00. We're wondering if we could keep most of those callers on the phone if they had a reasonable idea of how long they were going to have to wait.
It would be useful if:
- The wait time message would tell each caller the expected wait time based on the queue length at the current time (or, if not possible, the average length over the last 30 minutes - we generally have two peak periods per day).
- The wait time message would play back to the user on a configurable time interval - 90 seconds, 2 minutes, etc.
- Each time the wait time message plays, it reminds the user of the options to:
- dial 1 to leave a message
- dial "n" to keep your place in queue and get a call when your place in line comes up
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