Do you have a list of customer support objectives? Do you have them prioritized in a manner that, if followed orderly, will result in the customer support department you wish your company had? If so, then good, you’re on the right track to being a company that cares about progressive, increasingly effective customer support, and that’s a rare attitude these days it seems.

But, I bet you missed a few important customer support objectives that should be pretty high up on your lest. Hey now, no need to be defensive, everyone misses some, including me, so I have to listen to some idiot writer tell me I am doing it wrong, just like you. Grand, cyclical world isn’t it?

So let’s look at a few objectives you might have missed, and if so, quickly add them to the top of your list, because if you’re missing these, you’re really missing them, and you’ll see an inexplicable boost in effectiveness and efficiency if you incorporate and accomplish these objectives as soon as humanly possible.

First, have you set and/or achieved a goal of making hold times less stressful to your customers? You undoubtedly have been working to make hold times shorter, and call resolutions more common, but what about the interim, when customers still sit for long periods of time on the phone awaiting support or service?

Most call centers just loop bad music, with adverts or recorded wait time updates not allowing the user to zone out during the wait. Every two minutes is an ideal wait update, adverts should never, ever be forced on support seekers on hold, and the music should be neutral and calming – classical music with a good sound quality helps.

Reducing the stressfulness of a hold time is a poor substitute for remedying hold times long term, but it’s something – ergo, you should put this on your list. Make it less of a torment for the poor souls subjected to it.

Next, have you prioritized looking for alternatives to calling in? Have you marked looking at social networks, self service and other channels as a potential way to alleviate call center overload and add convenience of choice to customers?

Some people don’t like to talk on phones, and will find a text or automated environment more pleasant and less offputting, so this is something to consider in the long run, because it makes a big difference. You don’t have to adopt anything today, but mark on your objectives the state of having picked a potential plan for this when it becomes a prerequisite in a few years.

Including these multiple channels allows the customer to choose less congested avenues, or at least a more convenient channel for their specific tastes. It also allows for reduced workload on any given channel, as work is more evenly distributed, giving you a more streamlined, if still problematic customer support framework at your disposal. If you’ve not added these crucial items to your customer support objectives, then do so now, and start striving to achieve them right away, for the betterment of life for everyone who has been tormented by traditional call center support in the past.