The stars aligned last month when my car registration & driver’s license expired on nearly the same date. Oh, and my family and I moved to a new address, too. So what normally would have been three separate trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) became one *mega trip*!
Now, normally any visit to the DMV causes sweat-inducing anxiety, but with some recent upgrades to the DMV website I had a pretty good sense of what my “mega trip” would be like.
You see, my local DMV website now shows the number of customers waiting for each activity (e.g. license renewal, vehicle registration, etc.) and the estimated wait time for each of those activities, too. Plus, you can see the estimated wait times for each of their locations, so if your closest branch is crazy busy, you may pop over to another branch instead.
Now, some of you may be thinking, “We’re way ahead of you, Pete. We do that today by telling customers their estimated wait time in the IVR when they call us via live telephone.”
But with nearly 4 out of 5 customers going to your company website as their first step in resolving their issue, you should really be publishing wait information there, too. Plus, most customers contacting via the telephone are doing so *after they’ve failed in another channel*, so any tactics you can apply that will decrease the effort of the live phone experience should be adopted.
And if you want to take it a step further, you could follow the lead of some retailers who now post their estimated store shopper volumes by hour. A simple Google search of a local retailer showed me that their expected peak volume would occur between noon and 3 pm, and if I wanted to avoid the rush I should get there right when the store opened or wait until the last hour of the day.
To me, this idea of sharing “insider information” feels similar to the push that several Business-to-Business organizations that I’ve spoken with recently are making: providing greater transparency to their clients.
CEB Customer Contact Leadership Council has published the benefits of using transparency as a guiding principle in communicating with customers during live interactions, and this concept may very well apply here, too.
So, here’s my question to you: Do the benefits of sharing expected volumes in live channels outweigh the downside of publishing this information?
Here are some of the pros and cons that I’ve come up, and I’m interested in hearing what you would add to the lists and where you land…for or against this degree of transparency?
Pros:
+ customer experience is improved because they have a greater sense of what to expect
+ customers view the company as “being on their side” because of the transparency provided
+ company is able to more accurately staff to meet customer demand during expected peak volumes
Cons:
– predicted volumes may shift significantly and cause longer than expected wait times and poor customer experience
– predicted volumes don’t accurately predict true volumes, negatively impacting customer experience
I’m curious to hear where you fall in this debate, but I’ll show my colors a little on this one:
As a consumer, don’t you want to know *when* your experience is likely to be the easiest? I sure do…then maybe it will feel as easy as a trip to the DMV.
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