Adding a professional Message On Hold program to your phone system is an easy way to improve the image of your business. It helps you make a great first impression and helps your customers get valuable sales and service information. Here are 6 ways a professional on hold message can help improve your image:
1. Improve Customer Service
One of the most valuable benefits of a Message On Hold program is its ability to help your customer service representatives. As a starting point for your Message On Hold, consider adding frequently asked questions to your on hold script. Ask your customer service reps what questions they hear again, and again, and again, they put those answers on hold. This way, you might answer questions before even talking to a customer.
Another opportunity to improve customer service is to provide customers with self-service information. If you have help documentation or resources online, be sure to mention them on hold, so that your callers can access that helpful content on their own, leaving your staff free to help with more unique concerns.
2. Control Content
If you’re not actively planning content for your on hold program, and, say, play the radio on hold, you’re not controlling what you’re playing on hold. You’re at the whim of a Radio DJ or program manager, who might play music that’s unappealing to your callers or who might be producing and playing ads for your competition.
Not to mention it’s completely illegal to play the radio to callers on hold. Although the radio station has the appropriate license to broadcast music, your business does not, and that could leave you paying major fines.
3. Improve Sound Quality
When you work with a professional audio production company, that uses legally licensed music and professional voice over talent and has experience editing audio for telephony applications, the sound quality is going to be much better than something put together by an amateur or something you’ve recorded and thrown together yourself. Professional audio production is very cost-effective, and you’ll get a big bang for your buck by going professional.
4. Show You Care About Customer Experience
Do you care about the experience customers have in your store or facility? Are you concerned about the way your representatives communicate with your client base? Do you care about the experience callers have while they’re waiting to speak to those representatives?
It doesn’t matter how great your customer experience in store or with an employee is, if you neglect the on hold experience, you’re neglecting the customer. Not sold? Check out Number 5, below:
5. Eliminate the social media backlash.
If your on hold content, well, sucks, callers are going to call you out on it. Twitter Feedback is hardly new, but there are certainly a lot of people tweeting with the hashtag #onhold who will tell you a thing or two about what they like, and what they don’t, while they’re waiting to hear from a company. Maybe you’ll be surprised to see just how grim it can be… check out this sampling of tweets to see the good, the bad, and the UGLY.
6. Create helpful content that’s reusable.
Remember that part about getting more bang for your buck when you use a professionally produced on hold program? Here’s where it gets really interesting – if you’re doing everything right, and answering the questions and providing information that your customers really need and want to hear, there’s a good chance you can reuse the content you’ve already created. You can repurpose your Message On Hold as overhead announcements in your facility or store, as short videos, as website audio, and more. When you think outside of the box, there are many ways to take what you have and make it something more.
When creating content for your Message On Hold program, you should always keep your customer in mind. As the recipients of your messaging, they’re the ones with the most to gain – or lose – from what you have to say. But as you help your customers, you can also improve the impression they have of your business, and your image overall.
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