Guest Blog contributed by Scripts Consultant Megan Andriulli
Category: message on hold
Experience tells us day in and day out that “there is no magic word,” no abracadabra or panacea to solve our troubles; we must rely on hard work and dedication to overcome life’s obstacles.
Holdcom was recently involved in a fantastic customer service experiment. One of our long time clients hadn’t updated their message on hold program in over a year. Since the majority of their callers were return customers, they were curious whether their customers listened to the message or “tuned out” while waiting on hold.
You wake up with a headache, you burn your toast, and your car is covered in snow. On days like these, how do you keep your spirits up? How do you maintain the passion for your craft throughout the work day?
Can’t remember who said it or sang it, but there’s a line, “I can’t wait until tomorrow, because I get better looking every day.” Well that’s the way I feel about my business. As a service oriented company, we’ve always done a good job at a good price with responsive quality service, and we’ve been rewarded in kind. But now with things getting tougher and more competitive, we need to keep striving to keep service up and costs down. It’s a challenge but an exciting challenge, especially with all the ideas and solutions available to consider and implement.
In the past couple of months alone we’ve launched a robust company-wide wiki and an esign solution for our customers, which promise to streamline our internal operations and our sales initiatives respectively.
Our wiki contains or will contain the entire known knowledge of our business universe (I’m feeling like Superman’s dad, Jor-El), searchable by a few keystrokes by anyone in our organization who has a question or needs to respond to a question about anything we do. No longer will we need to meet in office doorways for impromptu trips down memory lane to remember “What do we do when this happens?” “Where do I find this?” “What’s our policy on that?” I suppose I’ll miss some of those doorway meetings, but hey, there’s always the water cooler.
My adolescent nephews have never experienced a Broadway play, so for their spring birthdays my husband and I took them to see Spiderman: Turn off the Dark. This show was in the headlines for various reasons – injuries, confusing plot, being the most expensive play ever produced, but it was an ideal way to introduce Broadway for novice attendees.
In last week’s blog, we discussed “7 Do’s and Don’t for Message on Hold” programs. Here are five more pieces of advice for designing the most effective “delay message,” adapted from the 2001 ICMI whitepaper by Jean Bave-Kerwin:
Summer is slowly ending, and back to school commercials have begun to play. It’s that time of month for us to share our monthly Healthcare Wellness Observance Days for September and the script excerpts that can be used. From Childhood Cancer Awareness Month to World Alzheimer’s Month we have the Message on Hold script excerpts you need to raise awareness and share prevention tips.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to share content regarding these August events! If you haven’t seen our previous July blog with additional content for healthcare you can check it out here. The August observances do differ from those of July, as in there are no observance days for the month of August. Each month does have its own observances, so no two months will share the same topics.
For most of us, being on hold isn’t exactly at the top of the list of our favorite ways to spend a few minutes. In this day and age, however, it’s sometimes unavoidable as a call is being transferred or held in a queue. Keeping hold time interesting and informative for your guests by including key information in your Message On Hold program can improve your customer experience, and therefore affect your hotel ratings.