It should come as no surprise that customers continue to rate excellent customer service high on the list of things they look for when choosing a company to do business with. The amazing thing is that most companies, in spite of customer demand, continue to offer customer service that is mediocre, or worse. It would seem that some companies just prefer to insult customers and lose business on purpose. The more likely answer is that they just don’t have a good customer service management training plan in place. We DO understand the value of great customer service training, and our Customer Service Management Training classes will empower you to train your customer service staff to give great service all the time, and keep your customers coming back to you.

With that in mind, here are five ways to reduce average call handle time.

1) Encourage self-service. Encourage the use of self-service tools. If the tools are useful and easy to use, more and more customers will use them. The reason for customers not using self-service tools is not because they are out to get you - it is because the tools are useless, hard to find, and/or hard to use. From my experience, customers like tools that are interactive, FAQs, tutorials with pictures, and searchable knowledge bases. Keep in mind that there is a fine line between encouraging and forcing self-service, though.

2) Build tools to answer common questions. If possible, build tools that help answer common questions that you would normally have to ask to find out about an issue. For example, have me to go a page that diagnoses my computer automatically instead of asking me a whole bunch of questions that does the same thing. It makes the experience easier for everyone.

3) Pre-verify. A lot of support calls require verification of a customer's identity. Or at the very least, gathering of the customer's personal information. There are always ways to include some sort of verification or reduce call time through your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Invest in a system that can look up a customer's phone number and ask for the last four digits of their credit card number. Most importantly, once the customer has verified their information using the IVR, don't ask them to repeat it.

4) Get to the root of the issue. Train your representatives to get to the root of the issue. Doing so usually involves learning how to ask the right questions and finding out what happened, what the customer expected to happen, and what the customer wants to happen (or a variation of that). If they know how to find out what the problem is, representatives will be able to resolve it much sooner.

5) Have fast systems . I am sure the IT managers, software engineers, etc. looking at this are groaning right now. As an executive, it is worth investing in fast systems. If the systems ran faster, there wouldn't be as much waiting. Use technologies that can make your systems fly and there will be less waiting.