Press "1" if you're tired of being on hold! Nobody likes to wait, but since customer service can't be packaged to sit on a shelf ready when we need it, everybody has to "get in line" for help from banks, credit card companies, stores, healthcare or tech support. These days, that usually means dialing a call center somewhere in the world, which makes understanding caller patience increasingly important. A recent study, co-authored by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business professors Baris Ata and Che-Lin Su, and published in the journal Management Science, offers a more accurate approach to modeling caller patience than ever before, which could help call centers reduce customer waiting time on hold while helping¹ businesses too.

 

"Knowing when a person decides to hang up or hang on is vital to streamlining call center operations, minimizing caller frustration² and maximizing each customer service encounter," says Su, an expert in operations management.

 

More precisely³ predicting caller behavior can help call centers design better systems going forward as well as fine-tune those already in place; particularly important when companies plan changes in their business or major marketing⁴ promotions⁵ that produce a surge of calls.

 

"It's no use spending millions on advertising⁶ a new product, service or event if your call center can't cope with the customer response," says Ata, also a professor of operations management.

 

Improving call center speed and service makes everyone happier; customers are calmer, phone agents less agitated⁷（焦虑的）, and business gets done more quickly and efficiently⁸. But these new insights can also help companies negotiate smarter contracts for out-sourcing such services.

 

"Since the model produces more realistic results for how long a caller will stay on the line, it enables a more precise estimate for the number of callers who can be served per hour, day and month," explains Ata.

 

Based on data drawn⁹ directly from 1.3 million calls to an Israeli bank's customer service center, the authors present a dynamic model of the caller patience and decision process. They tested their new model against previous research assumptions that caller patience never changes -- even if the call center improves call priority and routing systems.

 

"The previous models used assumptions of caller abandonment that were easy to apply and analyze¹⁰, but didn't provide a reasonable picture of people's patience," explains Su.

 

Four scenarios¹¹ simulating changes in call priority handling were run with both models, proving that the older-style assumptions may be misleading, as they produce caller-abandonment predictions that can be off substantially -- at times significantly overestimating¹² how long a caller is willing to hang on, or somewhat underestimating a caller's tendency to hang up.

 

"When a call center alters its discipline to improve speed and service, add agents, or change call routing and priority, we theorized those things should influence caller patience -- and our model shows that such improvements do indeed make a difference in whether people decide to hang up or hang on," concludes Su.

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