Months ago we added a “Live Chat” feature to our web pages to give web site visitors a direct connection to us…and the experience has been surprising.  Yes, we get inquiries from people searching for a better On Hold Marketing provider, but I believe we get more live-chat inquires from customers of OTHER companies that want to complain about the service they’re getting.

We think we know why we receive complaints about other providers.  Customers often think we’re their provider because there are so many on hold companies that have a company name similar to ours…..so, when someone Googles “On Hold Marketing”, they see our listing first (since we have earned the #1 position with the major search engines).

Now don’t me wrong, I’m not complaining.  When the offended customer realizes that we’re not the company that offended them, they often become customers…and the world becomes a better place.

The question is “Why are our competitors receiving so many complaints about lack of service, incomplete productions, not returning phone calls, productions are not being updated, and simply not being visible enough to be found?”  Naturally, we can’t answer this because we’re not them, but we do see that it’s an increasing trend. 

Ok, we do make it easy to find us…which has contributed to us hearing complaints about our competitors.   I guess that’s the point.  We do complete productions on time, do return phone calls, do work hard to get customers to update their audio On Hold programs…and when you need to find us…we’re easy to find.  You’ll find all our contact info on our On Hold player and invoices, or just google “On Hold Marketing”…we’ll be #1.

If you’re not a student of inbound telephone call statistics, you may not be aware that every business day, many phone calls are terminated before the sale or transaction is made because callers don’t like to wait on hold in silence…and they hang-up!

Ok, there may be other reasons why people hang up early.  Maybe their tea-pot started whistling, or the baby cried, or the dog was eating their homework…but much of the time, it’s because the caller felt like their on hold experience was not up to par with their expectation of customer service. 

That is to say that their perception of the time in waiting was too long…

…and their response is to disconnect or hang-up, terminating the sale or transaction

…and possibly the relationship present and future.

Enter Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity, commonly expressed as E=mc² .

Which, thankfully, for the rest of us, has also been expressed like this:

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes.

             When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours.

                         That’s relativity.”

The way your callers perceive their elapsed time On Hold is relative.

- A pleasant On Hold experience will be perceived as a less time than actual

- An unpleasant On Hold experience will be perceived as more time than actual. (Ouch!)                                                                                                  

Making an On Hold experience more painful than it needs to be is simply wrong…and bad for business…especially when there are intelligent, proven, and cost effective methods to cause On Hold time to be perceived as even shorter than it actually is.

Want to create a more pleasant On Hold experience that’s seems shorter than sitting on a hot stove?  Get in touch with a real studio specializing in On Hold message creation, preferably a member of the On Hold Messaging Association.

One of the beauties of a customized On Hold program is the ability to tell callers about products and services you offer that they may not know about. But be careful of trying to include everything you do in your On Hold program. 

Remember when the Yankees beat the Phillies in the 2009 World Series? Joe Girardi opted for a three-man rotation, even though he mostly used a five-man rotation during the regular season. Part of his thinking was “why use my fourth or fifth best pitchers in the games that matter the most, against the best team in the other league.” 

You can apply this concept to your On Hold program.  

Sure, you can include 15 or 18 topics/messages. But unless you have extraordinarily long hold times like the phone company, cable company, tech support or notorious long hold queues, you don’t really need an extremely long program. In fact, more messages can actually dilute the effectiveness of the messages you do wish to feature.  If your callers are on hold long enough to only hear one or two messages at a time, and you’ve got 15 messages in your program, how many messages are they NOT hearing? Or to put it another way, if you’ve got 15 messages, the odds are 15 to 1 that any message in particular is not being heard. Now, if you can identify your 6 or 8 most important topics, and just include messages on those topics, it’s 8 to 1 that your most important message is being heard. Better odds.  

Not unlike using your three best starters in the World Series. Ask Charlie Manuel how his #4 starter did in Game 4. 

Call us to talk about the most effective number of messages for your On Hold program.