Consumers on hold with a customer service representative hang up after reaching a "boiling point" of 13 minutes, according to a recent survey. Then, they're likely to ditch that company for another one.
The time they'll wait for in-person assistance is 12 minutes, according to the survey released by American Express. One in two Americans have ditched a purchase because they were fed up with bad customer service.
And while customers will tell an average of 15 people about a good experience, they're going to complain to 24 about a bad one, the survey said.
With 93 percent of survey participants saying they weren't satisfied with customer service, that's a lot of complaining.
Besides long hold times, customers got fed up with rude representatives and being passed to different departments with no resolution.
But not all the news is bad--it turns out customers' expectations aren't all that high. American Express says investing in better employees and setting goals to motivate them works wonders for performance.
