What are hold messages?
Hold Messages are the voice recordings that telephone callers when they are on hold. What are messages on hold going to do for you? Find out…
As with so many great inventions, the ability to play a recording on hold came about by chance: an insightful business person named Alfred Levy noticed that signals from a nearby radio station were being faintly heard by telephone callers he placed on hold. Recognizing the potential, in 1962, Levy developed circuitry that would enable him to control what telephone callers hear on hold. For his unique invention, Levy was granted a US Patent on the technology, number US3246082 on April 12, 1966. That was the beginning of using music on hold to make hold time less annoying.
Information on hold: the evolution of music on hold
Flash forward 20 years, and this same telephone circuitry was repurposed as a marketing tool. Music is nice, but why waste your callers’ time? Every contact you have with your customers is an opportunity which you can use, or lose. Messages on hold are, quite simply, combining music on hold with marketing messages.
A CNN survey found that that 70 percent of callers in the United States who hold the line in silence hang up within 60 seconds. Meanwhile, research by North American Telecom found callers hearing music on hold will stay on the line 30 seconds longer than callers experiencing silence. By giving your callers something more interesting than silence or music to listen to, you’ll give them more reasons to hold on, and not hang up.
What can this marketing tool do for you?
Marketing is most successful when you take the time to develop a strategy. Messages on hold are a marketing tool that makes use of an opportunity that you’re probably wasting. They transform boring, frustrating hold time into a chance to create more loyal customers and sell more. You’ve heard lots of messages on hold: generic messages, messages that keep apologizing for the delay and telling you how important your call is, messages that simply insert your company name and long list of your products into a script “template.”
What are messages on hold doing for your competition? They’re creating more loyal customers…helping them sell more…giving customers fewer reasons to contact you…and more.
What can you accomplish with them? Like any marketing tool, they can deliver your message to a potential customer. But what makes them unique is that they deliver that message to the right people at the right time: when they already want to talk with you!
Why not call today for a Free 15-minute strategy session: we’ll come up with 3 or more specific goals they can help you reach, every time your phone rings! In Connecticut call (203) 655-3920. Nationwide call (800) 862-8896. Or click here to email us.
