On-hold marketing is often overlooked by businesses upgrading their phone systems, but it can put the crucial finishing polish on the latest Cloud systems, impressing your customers and even improving efficiency.
This guide will cover everything you need to know about on-hold marketing, and how to make the most of it.
What is On Hold Marketing?
On hold marketing, or on hold messaging, is a broad term that encompasses all the scripted and pre-recorded messages that can play on your phone system. This can include:
- IVR or Auto Attendant menus.
- Queue greetings and position announcements.
- Messages played to callers while they’re on hold.
- Any other recordings a caller might hear, including voicemail greetings, informational messages and even fully automated information systems.
Professionally produced on hold messages are a phenomenal tool for your business.
The Benefits of On Hold Marketing
Professionally recording your phone system messages can have a huge range of benefits:
- Keep your callers informed. Whether it’s a brief message detailing your location and opening hours, or an outline of your latest offers and product deals. On hold messages keep every caller in the loop without overwhelming them with details.
- Answer common questions. One of the chief benefits of on hold messages is that they can resolve a lot of callers’ queries without the need to wait for an agent. Your on hold messages can be updated within minutes, giving you the ability to publicise emergency information like a site closure.
- Reduce overall wait times. Reducing the time it takes for your callers to reach a member of your team is one of the key goals of every customer service operation. By answering many common queries, on hold messages can free up agents to take the more complex calls. This reduces the volume of calls coming in to your contact centre and therefore improves your call answer rate without expensive technology or training.
- Create the best first impression. Professionally recorded greetings at the start of a call can really shape your callers’ impression of your brand. The best greetings create a lasting impression of professionalism and efficiency, improving customer confidence.
How to Make the Most of On Hold Messaging
We’ve all encountered phone systems with repetitive hold music and irritating messaging; poorly thought-out messaging can end up doing more harm than good. So, when you’re looking to apply recordings to your system, bear these in mind:
- Keep it brief. On hold messages can reduce the number of callers who need to speak to an agent, but it’s important to remember that a large proportion of your callers will need to speak to someone to resolve their queries. Keeping these callers waiting too long by playing a long set of messages can be frustrating.
- What do your customers actually want to know? Obviously, we can’t answer this question for you; no one knows your customers better than you do. But it’s always worth taking the time to analyse your call records to find out what your clients actually call you about. Doing as much as you can to resolve these queries at the start of a call goes a long way to reassuring your customers.
- Variety is the spice of life. This applies to your hold music just as much as your messaging. Irritating hold music is one of the most pervasive complaints about phone systems, so why not mix it up with a range of music? Modern systems like ours can play a selection of hold music files, so you can make sure your clients hear different music each time they call you.
- Professional recording makes all the difference. The modern HD audio codecs used by VoIP systems like ours can play music and messages at close to MP3 quality. This has obvious benefits while you’re speaking to your callers. It does mean that your clients will be able to hear every little detail of your recordings. So make sure they’re as good as they can be. Use a script that’s been expertly written and pay for your messages to be professionally recorded.
This is where Chrome comes in.
Not only do we have the knowledge and experience to guide you with setting up your messages, but we can record them too.
We partner with a huge variety of voiceover artists, musicians and content writers. This gives us all the contacts and tools we need to arrange for a complete set of bespoke messages and even hold music to be written for your phone system.
Want to find out more? We’ve included a sample of our previous work at the link below.
https://chrome.telephonemessage.co.uk/
To get the ball rolling, speak to the team on 03333 212 707. We’d be happy to discuss the available options for your phone system, and can offer advice on how to make the best use of them.
