On-Hold Messaging, Making the Most of a Captive Audience

 

 On-Hold Messaging, Making the Most of a Captive Audience


What is on-hold messaging?

It’s a message delivered to callers that are waiting on hold. It lets you provide information, answer questions, and ultimately engage with your customers while they await an available agent.

Here’s an infographic with some stats: http://www.infographicworld.com/on-hold-messaging-what-you-should-know

Here are some examples of the literature available to help companies determine the effectiveness of on-hold messaging: http://www.onholdmessages.com/library/on_hold_documents
The purpose of this article is to share with you what we’ve learned while working with clients and our own experiences in using on hold messaging concepts to engage callers.
This is not a comprehensive study; but rather a sampling of what we’ve found works, as well as some insights gained from working with clients.
This is not intended to be a sales pitch for our services. We don’t actually offer telemarketing on-hold messaging (yet).
The goal is to share some of the insights we’ve learned by working with clients and to give some advice on what you can do yourself.
We’ve seen that some companies deliver an awful lot of information, either all at once or over too long a time. This can be overwhelming and confusing even when it’s good content.
We’ve also seen that too many callers get left hanging while they wait for a callback. So we give you some practical advice on how to make your on-hold messages more effective and leave the rest up to our clients, who are experts and can customize their messages as needed.
On-Hold Messaging: What You Should Know
First, you need to know what's going on during the call.
After a script is read, the caller usually has to listen to an on-hold message.
Here's what happens:
The system plays a quarter-hour of recorded audio (recorded in advance), which often includes your current voice.
There might be other music tracks that get played through the system, too (though this is rare).
You have to read a script with verbiage that sounds like you are offering information and explanations. You may even look at a script or mockup while you record it, if time permits. In an ideal world, you could record it by looking off into the middle distance, but this is not the best choice for the caller.
Typical protocol is to play everything that was recorded in advance, then wait for a callback. The system will then call back the caller after a period of time (e.g., 15 minutes), and if no one picks up, will leave a message. If they hang up before they get called back or don't leave a message, they are put back on hold and play another quarter-hour of material (and then additional messages on top if needed).
When you work with us at On Hold Messaging Services , you can request that we call them back instead of playing more audio.

Conclusion: It's a good thing that calls are not being handled live, because we've seen some on-hold messages that are quite frustrating to wait through.
Second, you need to know what's going on with the caller.
This is important so that you can address common questions and concerns and give your callers the information they need.
How long have they been waiting? (If it's 10 minutes or longer, alarm bells should be going off.

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