Would You Wait Over 7 Hours To Speak To Walmart?

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine in Canada sent me this (image below) from the Walmart customer service page on their phone. The customer is offered the option to either chat to an agent or to call one. The expected wait time for an agent on chat is 7 minutes and for a call it’s 7 hours and 15 minutes - good thing it’s a toll-free number.

This was in February 2021, not the height of the pandemic chaos last year. Just to convince myself that the service times could really be this bad, I went and checked on the Walmart US help page, to see the time required to call them. It was considerably better than the Canadian example I received, but I was checking in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, and they still needed about 7 minutes to answer a chat and half an hour to answer a call.

Go back five years and look at how much tolerance people have. If a website didn’t load inside 3 seconds then the user would navigate to something else. Today even 3 seconds feels like too long. It loads or it doesn’t and you move on.

Loading a website and calling a customer service line for help may feel different, but what do you think is a reasonable time for either? I don’t think that half an hour is an acceptable time to wait to speak to a representative of Walmart and seven hours is just off the chart. Even the 7 minutes to start a chat feels like ages when watching your phone, waiting for a response. Who wants to use live chat anyway? It's usually awful.

Thinking about this as a commentator on the CX industry and looking at the Walmart help pages I noticed several interesting features:

1. Classic chatbot: there is the option to be immediately helped by a chatbot, but it has that common problem - it’s not very good. It doesn’t understand natural language questions very well. Chatbots can work really well for step-by-step processes where the bot is guiding the customer - onboarding a new customer for example - but when the option to ask anything is there then most of them still feel clunky. Plus, if you use the automated chatbot then you are no longer waiting in line for a human.
2. No asynchronous channel: if I could send a WhatsApp message then a response in 7 minutes would feel like rapid service. Instead of waiting in line for an agent, I can just fire off a question and then get on with my life - the company can respond as soon as they have someone available. With chat on a standard platform like WhatsApp there is no problem about each message taking a few minutes because it’s asynchronous. Why is there no text option?
3. Covid is no longer an excuse: to be fair to Walmart, I have not seen the company publicly stating that the Covid-19 pandemic is the reason for this slow service, but I have seen several other major brands doing so. We are now a year into this so no brand should be claiming that they are struggling to answer phone calls because of the pandemic.

As far as I know Walmart processes all their customer service interactions in-house, they don’t have a CX specialist managing their contact centers. This leads me to two suggestions:

1. Consider a CX specialist: if your internally managed contact centers are performing this poorly then why not see what the CX community can do? Look at the results for companies like Transcom and Teleperformance in 2020 - they gained clients, earned more than ever, and managed their way through the pandemic crisis. Agree on some Key Performance Indicators and let the specialists manage these calls.
2. Explore Gig CX: you might be aware that I recently wrote a book about Gig CX with Brian Pritchard and Terry Rybolt from LiveXchange. It’s been fascinating to see how Gig CX is growing into one of the most innovative areas of modern CX, supporting work-from-home and finding agents who love the brand. Walmart could retain all their team in-house, but build up a Gig CX bench of talent all across the US - and beyond. Build out the team and just ask them to help out anytime there is an issue. Walmart could even start searching for people who post about the brand on Instagram and ask, hey do you want to spend a couple of hours a week helping Walmart customers? It could even create a network of Walmart ambassadors, people who already love the company, but now have the opportunity to help the customers. 

Walmart cannot expect customers to wait hours to offer them help. Loyal customers will drift away to other retailers that actually pick up the phone. Even the biggest and most famous brands can wither and die, especially if you look at how retail is being dramatically changed by the pandemic.

If they want to keep the customer service team in-house then Gig CX has to be worth exploring. If they are open to working with a specialist then I’m sure every major CX supplier would love to win the Walmart contract.

And just to be fair to Walmart, it’s a company that I respect and I do think that they have shown a flair for innovation over the years that proves there is more to modern retail than Amazon alone. This is why I find it so hard to process. Walmart leads in many areas of retail innovation, but struggles to just pick up the phone in a reasonable time - why? If anyone from the company sees this and actually wants to respond then this is an open invitation to feature on my CX Files podcast - I’d love to hear from you.

Let me know what you think about the image from Canada? What’s your own experience trying to reach Walmart on chat or on the phone? Leave a comment here or get in touch via my LinkedIn profile.

CC Photo by magnet.me