A study has shown that 87% of German callers will only accept a maximum hold time of three minutes or less. “The fact is that we also have clear peak times in our call centers when only a fraction of customers can be directly put through to an advisor. Other times, meanwhile, we are hardly utilizing our capacity – although of course the customer does not know that,” explains Michael Chriske from PowerService GmbH, a subsidiary of MediaMarktSaturn Germany. “It was precisely this that we wanted to address in collaboration with startup virtualQ.”

Wait and callback management technology from virtualQ is designed to better distribute peak and idle periods in order to optimize capacity utilization within a service center. In reality, this means that if a customer calls at a peak time and the call center is working to capacity, virtualQ will offer them an automatic callback in the near future, as soon as an advisor becomes available. The aim is not only to increase customer satisfaction in the long term, but also to reduce pressure on employees in the call center and ultimately reduce costs through improved use of resources.