How long does your mobile network keep you on hold? In today’s 24/7 digital age, we’re used to getting things on demand, we don’t expect to have to wait.

Published on 1st May 2020

How long does your mobile network keep you on hold?

In today’s 24/7 digital age, we’re used to getting things on demand. Whether it’s ordering a product online for next-day delivery or accessing help via live chat software on companies’ websites when making a purchase, we don’t expect to have to wait.

The same applies to customer service questions. When people have queries or complaints for their product or service providers, they want to get a response there and then. But exactly how speedy are businesses when it comes to providing answers? We decided to investigate this issue, looking specifically at popular mobile phone networks and comparing response times by phone and via social media.

To do this, we looked at the average time it took the companies to reply to customer service questions on Twitter, and we also called their customer service helplines to see how long it took to get through to a representative.

The results

We’ve all experienced the frustration of calling an organisation only to be left on hold for what feels like an age waiting to be put through to the right person. Experiences like this can understandably make people wary of dialling customer service lines when they have a query, leading many to engage with businesses via online platforms such as Twitter instead. But does social media really offer a quicker way to get the answers we want?

You might be surprised to discover that it was actually much quicker to contact these businesses by phone than on social media. Whereas it takes people nearly an hour and a half on average to get an answer via Twitter, we were able to get through to customer service representatives by phone in under four minutes on average.

As you might expect, there were significant differences between the companies’ response times via both channels, with some performing much better than others. This issue is something that consumers may well pay attention to when they’re choosing a mobile provider.

Check out our infographic to get the full lowdown on customer service response times.

Phone vs Social - Response Times