Image & Branding
Messages On Hold A Must for Your Customers
When customers and prospective customers call your business and you need to put them on hold, do you leave them hanging there in silence or listening to radio static? You may think your callers do not care for or even notice the phone hold music, but the truth is, they do… and they are listening.
It is important to remember that callers to your company are a captive audience, for when they inquire about your product or service, they are already interested and their mind is open to any message you send because they are looking for your product or service to fill a need or solve a problem. If they are motivated to call you, they want more information, not less, so the form of delivering information is irrelevant to the opportunity to present that information.
A quality customized on hold message and music program is crucial to presenting a polished image and allows you to control what your callers hear and how they perceive your business. Like it or not, your company brand exists. You can control how that brand is seen by your customers or (by doing nothing) have it controlled for you.
Don’t underestimate the value of on hold messages as an important component of your customer service efforts.
Reach Customers In Real Time With On Hold Messages
With custom on hold messages, you can quickly and conveniently offer information about your business to callers waiting on hold or in a queue. As you may know, a caller is already interested in your product (the reason they are calling) so you already have a targeted prospect on the phone.
Use your on hold message to direct callers to your website, blog or Facebook page for additional information or specials. By driving traffic and creating a community where your customers and potential customers spend time, you create another opportunity to continue connecting with them as part of your overall marketing strategy.
After you have successfully directed your on hold callers to your website or other online destination, you can then encourage them to share your products, services or specials via their social and online networks. Thereby creating an army of brand ambassadors!
This is about what information your company can offer or how you might use on hold messaging to work in tandem with your Internet goals.
Making the Most of Your Advertising Investment
It’s a good idea for every company to have a message and music on hold program on their phone system because, quite frankly, advertising in general is expensive enough.
Whether you use television, radio, newspapers, direct mail or the Internet to get people to contact your company, when they do call, don’t stop there. Certainly, most of the work is done and that initial advertising investment paid off. Yes, they called you. However, they haven’t purchased anything yet.
The impression and experience callers get from dealing with your company will determine if they actually buy from you, so if you have to put them on hold, why not allow them to listen to information about your company to reinforce your brand and remind them why they called you in the first place.
Remember that poor ‘hold music’, or even worse none at all, has the potential to cause over half of callers to abandon calls (source: Avaya). Faced with such a situation, 15 percent of all callers will not call back.
When people choose to call your company, keep them engaged with a custom on hold message and music recording that promotes your products and services, increases caller awareness and decreases caller hang-ups.
Because you put your company image on the line every time you put a call on hold.
