Virtual Hold Enhances Customer Experience for Southern California Edison

Virtual queuing solutions developer, Virtual Hold Technology (News - Alert), LLC (VHT) has announced that Southern California Edison (SCE) is planning to add the Virtual Hold solution to provide better customer service to its customers. 

"SCE is already achieving its customer service goals," said Michael Somody, VHT's director of customer care and operations, in a company statement.

"By adding the Virtual Hold virtual queuing software, SCE is showing how dedicated they are to improving the customer experience. In addition to even happier customers, SCE should also see improved service levels, fewer abandons, and reduced costs."

SCE’s contact centers located in Rancho Cucamonga and Long Beach, CA (News - Alert) will receive installations of the Virtual Hold Concierge and Virtual Hold Rendezvous.

While placing a customer on hold is not necessarily the preferable next step for the busy contact center, it can be necessary during peak volume calling times, or even to properly route the call to the right agent. Hold times can vary according to activity within the center, but as far as the customer is concerned, they have to wait and it may cause frustration.

Once installation is complete, an SCE contact center that experiences hold time will be able to rely on the Virtual Hold system to information customers of the hold time and allow them to choose whether they want to wait on hold, hang up and receive a callback in the same amount of time as through they had waited on hold, or schedule a callback at a later time.

As an Edison International company, Southern California Edison (News - Alert) is the largest electric utility in California, serving a population of more than 13 million through 4.8 million customer accounts in a 50,000-square-mile service area within central, coastal, and southern California.

Since its inception in 1995, VHT’s virtual queuing technology has provided return call solutions that focus on enhancing the customer experience for financial services, energy utility, insurance, telecommunications, cable, wireless and retail corporations such as IBM, Bank of America, T-Mobile, Amerigroup, AT&T, Banco Popular, Verizon, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable, Ticketmaster, and AVON.

Most consumers are comfortable waiting a minute or two while their call is transferred to someone who can help them solve their problem. No one however, wants to hear that the center is backed up and that their call will be answered in the order in which it was received. This could be ten minutes or an hour – who has that much time to wait on hold?

SCE understands that their customers have better things to do than wait and prefers to provide them an alternative. As contact centers continue to deal with increased call volumes – especially during the holiday season – a solution such as Virtual Hold can not improve the experience for the customer, but also protect the company from customer churn due to frustration with wait times.