Calling a company's contact center can be a frustrating experience for many customers, especially when wait times are long.
Automatic callbacks, however, can boost customer experience, lower telecommunications costs and improve workforce management, according to experts.
"It's a big, loud way to tell customers you care," said Max Ball, principal analyst at Forrester.
Customer experience scores in the U.S. have reached an all-time low, declining for the third year in a row, according to Forrester Research's 2024 Customer Experience Index. One oft-cited source of displeasure: calling customer service.
Long wait times can negatively affect customer experience, with many people hanging up before they resolve their issues or speak with a representative — a phenomenon known as call abandonment.
About 1 in 4 customers will abandon their attempt to receive customer service if they call and have to wait too long on hold, according to a recent Gartner survey.
How automatic callbacks help CX and the bottom line
An automatic callback option allows customers to receive a return phone call from a customer service representative rather than wait in a queue. These functions are usually part of an interactive voice response or automated phone system or integrated into a cloud-based software solution.
Providing customers with an automatic callback option can be a cost-effective way to reduce average wait times, improving the experience and lowering call abandonment rates, experts said.
Automatic callbacks can also reduce work-related stress for contact center employees and ease staffing concerns.
"You don't deal with as many angry customers who have been waiting on hold for an extended period," Ball said. "It can flatten some of the peaks and valleys [in call volume]. So you can have a bit less staff, and it's less of a scramble getting people to the calls."
Automatic callbacks can also help companies save money by reducing the time customers spend on toll-free phone lines, which often charge by the minute.
"That was the original business case. It wasn't customer experience," said Steve Blood, VP of market intelligence and evangelism at Five9.
Companies that have high call volumes, industries that deal with seasonal variability, such as airlines, and businesses with long average handling times, such as tech support lines, are most likely to benefit from automatic callbacks, experts said.
Why many companies don't offer automatic callbacks
Automatic callbacks are often a win-win for businesses and customers, but many companies don't offer them because they would rather avoid customer service calls altogether, Ball and Blood said.
In recent years, many businesses have sought to eliminate the costs associated with customer service lines by hiding the phone number and relying on self-service options like FAQs webpages and chatbots, Blood said.
"There's a real backlash to that," Blood said, pointing to the widespread decline in customer satisfaction.
While technologies like generative AI have the potential to reduce call volumes at contact centers by improving chatbots, customers still need to speak with a human from time to time, and automatic callbacks are "a very cheap way to manage calls," Blood said. "We don't think voice is going away."
Eventually, generative AI-powered chatbots will be able to handle more customer inquiries and help customer service representatives provide better support by ensuring that customers can speak with a human when needed, but "that's probably a couple of years away," Blood said.
While many phone and omnichannel contact systems include automatic callback functionality — or offer it for an additional charge — some contact center leaders mistakenly believe implementation would be more challenging than it is, according to Josh Streets, CEO and founder of Scoreboard Group Consulting and technology practice leader at ICMI.
Other leaders may have the "misconception" that automatic callbacks can cause more trouble than their worth by providing incorrect callback times to customers, Streets said. Some contact center leaders also worry, based on their experience as customers, that the rise of "rampant" robocalls could lead automatic callbacks to go unanswered, causing additional operational challenges for contact centers.
But automatic callbacks "are a proven satisfier," Streets said. "That's why it's been adopted by so many of the great brands out there."
What to consider before implementing callbacks
Before adopting automatic callbacks, companies should conduct an analysis to better understand why their customers call them, Blood said, noting that many businesses have "no idea."
"You'll probably find, on average, that about 30% of those calls could actually be avoided," Blood said.
In those instances, improved communications, such as product announcements, websites and chatbots could help avoid many unnecessary calls.
Once a company has taken those proactive measures, they can consider offering customers an automatic callback option since voice calls are "likely to be a later stage in the journey," Blood said.
Companies usually offer an automatic callback based on call volumes, abandonment rates or once the average waiting time reaches a certain threshold, such as 10 minutes.
"A lot of that can be automated these days," Streets said.
Additionally, while most businesses offer simple automatic callbacks with no specified timeframe, some allow customers to select a callback time that's convenient for them.
However, companies must ensure they have enough staff to call customers at the requested time or risk angering them, Ball and Blood said. Customer experience leaders should also consider how scheduled callbacks could affect their staff.
"Workforce managers in the contact center are the ones that get really uptight about scheduled callback times," Streets said. "There have to be a lot of rules in place for a scheduled callback."
Other best practices can help ensure customers pick up an automatic callback, including providing customers with an expected callback time, telling customers to expect a call from a specific state or area code, or using branded caller ID, Streets said.
Several vendors will soon offer AI-powered, omnichannel contact center solutions to help customers transition from self-service to a voice call with a human, including first-available and scheduled callbacks, whether the first contact point was a chatbot, social media or email, Streets said.
Whether and how to adopt automatic callbacks ultimately depends on the customer experience a company wants to deliver. Some companies, including online retailers like Amazon, may want to rely mainly on self-service, while others, such as luxury brands, seek to offer a higher level of service.
"Those that are in the middle are going to have to figure out which they want to be," Streets said.
Disclosure: ICMI is owned by Informa TechTarget, the publisher of CX Dive. Informa TechTarget has no influence over CX Dive’s coverage.
