Tired of a long queue over a customer care call to your bank or ordering your favourite food? Hang on.
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have offered a more accurate approach to understand caller patience than ever before.
This could help call centres reduce customer waiting time on hold while helping businesses too.
"Knowing when a person decides to hang up or hang on is vital to streamlining call centre operations, minimising caller frustration and maximising each customer service encounter," says Che-Lin Su from University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
"It's no use spending millions on advertising a new product, service or event if your call centre cannot cope with the customer response," says Baris Ata, a professor of operations management at University of Chicago.
Predicting caller behaviour can help call centres design better systems going forward as well as fine-tune those already in place, said the study published in the journal Management Science.
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Based on data drawn directly from 1.3 million calls to a bank's customer service centre, the authors presented 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 centre improves call priority and routing systems.
For example, when a call centre alters its discipline to improve speed and service, add agents or change call routing and priority, we found that those things should influence caller patience.
"Our model shows that such improvements do indeed make a difference in whether people decide to hang up or hang on," explained Su.
"Since the model produces more realistic results for how long a caller would stay on the line, it enables a more precise estimate for the number of callers who can be served per hour, day and month," added Ata.