Periods of heavier than usual call traffic are inevitable for any type of call center. If you can effectively manage call queue management, it presents an opportunity for your team to strengthen customer relationships and relish the accomplishment of a job well done.

Otherwise, peak hours can become stressful communication chokepoints that lead to high customer churn and widespread employee burnout.

Even the smallest tweaks to your approach can make a big difference – we’ve rounded up the best examples below.

1. Implement a callback option

Offering callers the option to receive a callback rather than waiting on hold is a win-win. That’s immediately one less caller in the queue, and that caller is usually excited to get back to their lives instead of waiting on hold. When the call volume goes down, you can call them back, and everything is fine.

I love the possibility of a callback, and it’s becoming so common that I start to get frustrated when companies don’t offer it. It’s a much better experience than having to half-pay attention to the lo-fi music on the phone speaker while I try to accomplish something else.

For inbound scenarios, especially customer service, I would look for call center software that makes it easy to set up a callback option. It’s most likely nested within the call center’s interactive voice response (IVR) features, and you might see it referred to as queue callback, virtual hold, customer callback, auto callback – that’s the same thing.

It’s one of the easiest ways to improve customer experience by reducing frustration during peak hours. This also takes the pressure off your agents and means they’re dealing with fewer callers leaving long waits.

I would not implement this feature for urgent calls. If a customer has an emergency, for example, the call-back option will not be well received.

2. Expand IVR self-service options

A call center IVR system costs a lot of money, so it stands to reason that a business should try to get the most out of it.

Start by looking at your IVR Containment Rate: Every percentage point higher you can increase this number represents another fraction of callers who don’t need to speak to an agent. Look for the addition of self-service options to help you troubleshoot basic issues, check account balances, or make a payment using IVR.

Automating each of these tasks reduces the number of calls transferred to live agents, allowing them to focus on more complex issues. A knock-on effect is that wait times are reduced, which improves customer satisfaction.

Savings on operational costs are also significant. You probably have an idea of ​​how much each call costs – usually between $3 and $10 per call, potentially more – well, every call successfully resolved by IVR represents a money savings.

In addition, the reduction in volume will minimize the need for additional staff to manage peak hours. This means less hiring and less training.

Reviewing your IVR self-service options should be part of any call queue management strategy. What can you streamline, what can you improve, what additional responsibility can your IVR take on for busy agents?

3. Offer online help resources

Help your customers help you by posting accurate, helpful information on topics that callers care about. Your website can be a great resource for customers and will reduce call volume during peak hours.

The first benefit is that fewer people will have to call when they can find the answer to their question, problem or concern simply by visiting your website.

You can also invite callers in the queue to use website resources, which can help the caller self-serve without talking to an agent (win-win). And even if the caller can’t 100% resolve their issue themselves, they learned more about the issue on your site, which likely makes the call with the agent much smoother.

Many people prefer not to have to make a phone call to get something done. Posting FAQs and guides about your product is really helpful to your customers and is one of the most cost-effective queue management tactics.

If you’re struggling to justify the budget needed to ensure your online help resources are top-notch, remember that creating helpful content is exactly what Google wants to see and will drive organic search traffic high-intent and extremely relevant to your site.

This is an old SEO content strategy that still works today. Is it you or your competitor getting that traffic, so what about that budget? Gain more traffic for your brand site while solving high call wait times – it’s not bad at all.

4. Capture customer information before calls

Customers don’t like to waste time and effort repeating themselves. Asking them to do this is enough to get a poor customer satisfaction score (CSAT), even if your agents do everything else perfectly.

You can help callers save time, ensure they never have to repeat themselves, and reduce call queue management requirements by using IVR to request caller information instead of waiting for the agent to pick up.

While the caller is still on hold, the IVR can authenticate their identity and collect vital information such as their preferred language, social security number, account number, date of birth and the nature of their call. This information can be used to route the call appropriately without an agent having to answer and transfer the call to another agent.

Additionally, the information improves the quality of customer interaction because the agent does not need to request and receive information verbally. There is less chance of error and the agent can start helping the customer as soon as they respond.

Maybe you already have this set up, but have you captured as much useful information as possible?

For example, let’s say the caller’s number is linked to a record in your call center CRM software, great, but the customer might be afraid that you can quickly access the right agent. Call center automated speech recognition (ASR) has come a long way, and the system has the ability to understand and process the caller’s request, quickly routing them to the right person in your business without having to need an agent to act as an intermediary.

5. Prioritize urgent calls

Businesses can categorize incoming calls to ensure priority customers or high-value queries are answered first. This requires a bit of configuration on the backend, but it’s a standard part of peak hour call handling that prevents important customers from getting lost in the rush.

Your phone system should identify what or who is considered urgent and then automatically route those calls to agents who can help you.

As long as you’ve integrated your call center with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, it should be pretty straightforward. Otherwise, you will need to configure another way for your phone system to recognize callers.

Potentially, you could set up IVR menus allowing customers to self-select whether they are urgent callers. For example, “To report a lost or stolen credit card, press 3.”

The IVR menu option works in some cases, but it is not a good way to handle all types of priority calls. Most businesses rely on CRM integration to automatically recognize when a high-priority call is coming.

This could be from a client account of a certain size, from a client who spends a certain amount each month, depending on what’s important to your goals. Mark them in the CRM as eligible for priority call handling and ensure the backend is staffed to handle it.

If you have a conversational IVR, you can train the system to detect critical issues, which can be routed to the front of the queue, while lower priority requests are handled when time permits.