Keeping Customers Waiting: How Long Is Too Long?

Keeping customers waiting too long isn’t good for business. It can lead to complaints and negative reviews – or you could end up driving away customers altogether. 

Of course, it’s not always possible to give customers what they want immediately. You can’t rush high quality results, and there may only be so much money you can spend on extra staff and time-saving tech to help you speed things up. Sometimes customers have to wait a bit – but how do prevent these waiting times from getting too long?

This post delves more into a few situations where long waiting times can have bad results, and what you can do to speed things up.

Website loading speed

When it comes to website loading speed, seconds can make a difference as to whether a visitor stays or leaves. For companies that rely heavily on their website to attract new customers, optimizing website loading speed is essential.

Just how long should a webpage take to load? Ideally no more than 2.5 seconds. Anything longer than this can lead to reduced rankings and a high bounce rate. This post explains more as to how loading speed can affect bounce rate. 

There are several ways to improve the loading speed of a website including reducing redirects, optimizing images and getting rid of any unnecessary code. If you’re not particularly tech-savvy, consider looking into web design services for small businesses who can make all these improvements for you. 

Shipping times

Selling products online? Most customers expect to receive an item in no less than 5 business days. In fact, 90% of consumers said that 2-3 days was what they considered to be the norm. If the estimated shipping time is more than 5 days, expect a high abandoned shopping cart rate.

You can offer fast shipping by making sure that all items are dispatched on the day of purchase and by working with fast couriers. Most top carriers are able to offer shipping in 1 to 2 days. Of course, if you’re shipping items across the world, it may not always be possible to provide fast shipping unless you embrace dropshipping – this involves storing inventory in overseas warehouses across the world so that products can be shipped from the nearest location.

Shipping delays may still be inevitable in some cases and customers in remote locations may have no choice but to wait longer. In these cases, try to keep customers as informed as possible and consider using couriers that allow customers to track their delivery using GPS. 

Food waiting times

Waiting times have a big impact on customer satisfaction in restaurants. The amount of time customers are willing to wait before they complain varies depending on the type of establishment:

• Customers in fast food restaurants expect their food within 5 minutes.
• Cafes should serve up meals in no more than 15 minutes
• For casual restaurants, aim for 15 to 30 minutes.
• In fine dining restaurants where meals are made from scratch, 45 minutes should be the maximum waiting time. 

How do you reduce wait times in a restaurant? This is an example of an industry where having well-trained staff and the right equipment is essential. However, there is so much more you can do to speed up service. One solution is to let customers reserve tables and order food in advance – this allows you to start making food before customers arrive. Prepping is also key – maximizing the amount of food that is prepped before the restaurant opens can prevent you having to make meals entirely from scratch. 

When long waiting times are non-avoidable, instead think about how you can occupy customers while they wait. Many restaurants serve complimentary foods like bread, water and olives for giving customers something to eat while they wait. For restaurants that market themselves as family-friendly, providing crayons and color-in kids’ menus with activities could be a great way to avoid dealing with kids’ tantrums and irate parents. 

Phone queues

How long should customers be left waiting on the phone? Ideally no more than 2 to 3 minutes. While phone queues can help to make sure each customer gets answered, studies show that 90% of callers hang up after being on hold for 5 minutes. 

An obvious way to reduce phone queuing times is to hire more staff to answer the phone, but this can get expensive. Outsourcing phone answering companies can be beneficial for businesses that don’t have dedicated receptionists, preventing employees from having to interrupt other tasks to answer the phone. These phone answering companies also tend to have huge teams that they can use to manage large call volumes.

Other ways to reduce long phone queues include providing FAQs pages and chatbots to answer general enquiries, or hiring a dedicated operator to arrange callbacks. It’s also possible to make waiting times less dull by looking into features like hold music selection or setting up an automated voice to periodically tell callers what place they are in the queue. 

Email response times

Responding to customer emails in good time is also vital. For sales and urgent enquiries, the optimal response time is 1 hour. However, good practice for general customers is within 24 hours. 

What happens if you take longer than 24 hours to answer customer emails? You could start to see frustrated follow-up emails, or you may lose out on a business if it’s a customer enquiry. Scheduling hours specifically for catching up on emails or even hiring dedicated staff members to take over busy inboxes can help to reduce slow responses and could help to prevent complaints or lost business.

If answering all emails within 24 hours is unrealistic due to juggling an array of other tasks, consider setting up auto-reply emails to help confirm receival and manage expectations (‘we’ll get back to you within 48 hours’). In this email, you could tell people to call you if it’s an emergency, but make sure that this is on a number that you can answer immediately so that you’re not directing people from an overflowing inbox to a long phone queue.