Survey: Customers Eager to Throw Off Service Appointment Shackles

How much do customers hate getting a service appointment window of "next Thursday, sometime between the hours of 10 a.m. and 3 p.m."? Unless their household is one of the rare few with someone home all day, every day, they hate it a lot. Proactive customer communications software is designed to help providers drastically reduce those wait windows -- and stop wasting their customers' valuable time.
 
Although many CRM projects were deferred or cancelled in 2009, Forrester’s latest research emphasizes that organizations are investing again to improve their customer-management capabilities. Download Forrester’s report (a $1,749 value) to find where: www.compareCRMsolutions.com.

Apparently years of complaints by consumers about long wait periods for service providers have gone unheeded: The standard three-to-five hour appointment period for in-home visits by cable companies, utilities and repairpersons is still very much in force, a new survey found.
 
The 2010 In-Home Service Appointment Survey, conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of SoundBite Communications, deliberately used evocative language to gauge just how deep consumers' feelings ran on this subject, said Mark Friedman, chief marketing and business development officer.
 
"As we found, people feel quite strongly about it," he told CRM Buyer. "We asked them if they feel like a prisoner while waiting, and 51 percent said 'yes.'"
 
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