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A reflection on our 30 year anniversary and building an industry.
By Andrew Begnoche Director of Operations at Holdcom

February 7th, 2017 CDM Studios, New York, NY
“Let’s stop there for a second,” interjects the engineer as he pushes the talk back mic in the main studio at New York City’s CDM Studios, waiting for feedback from the writers and producer. As long time creative collaborators and business owners, Harvey Edelman and Neil Fishman banter back and forth about the performances during the recording of a ground-breaking audio book musical project they’re pioneering. 

As I watch Neil and Harvey work through their creative process on an adaption of their musical version of Rumpelstiltskin, a story about a man who spins straw into gold, I can’t help reflect on our journey and how we’ve been trying to spin our own straw into gold at Holdcom. In order to best tell that story we need to go back to the beginning.

Voice prompt menus, IVR, and auto attendant greetings can be a helpful way to get more information to your customers. You can mention your business hours, current specials, a temporary store closing, or a charity drive that you’re going to be having in the near future. Since you may already have an idea about what you want to say on your phone script, here are a few things you will want to steer clear of:

The customer experience of your phone customers means your business moving ahead or remaining stagnant. Here are three tips from Fortune 500 companies about how to make that experience top quality and create a loyal customer out of the casual customer over the phone.

As a business owner, you want to make sure the many moving parts don’t lose sight of the overarching mission and your brand image stays consistent. Your brand does have its own identity, which leads to the whole brand image. A brand’s image should be created based upon who your target audience is, what you do, and how you see your company.

Chances are your business has a vision statement, and chances are your marketing team spent a good deal of time crafting it.  Company vision statements are written and rewritten, honed, tested, massaged, and whipped into shape until they get the necessary buy in and end up tucked away somewhere on the company website.  Now, here’s the $64,000 question:  does anyone really care?

A previous post from Holdcom discussed the value of entertaining videos in a world where John Travolta is better known for his role in Scientology than his role in Saturday Night Fever.  If you didn’t get the chance to read it, you can check out the full article here.  

An Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) can be a very valuable tool for a company. What it does is fairly self-explanatory: it distributes calls automatically, letting your customer service team focus on serving customers instead of having to spend time directing calls. ACDs have a large number of additional benefits beyond saving time, however.

Any business owner who remembers John Travolta dancing in a white suit instead of stumping for Scientology knows that videos and social media are not the only way to grow a business. So I’ve had to accept that the world, and the business world, has changed, and that we needed to do more than direct mail campaigns and trade shows to increase revenues. And we did. At my company, we do regular email marketing, keep our website current and cutting edge, and write our daily/weekly blogs. Some might argue it’s an economical tradeoff for brand awareness, promoting business and generating leads. But what about producing entertaining, ambitious videos, that aren’t even necessarily trying to sell? All that time, resources, and money, just to say “Hey world, we’re here. Look at us!” It’s a tough pill to swallow for the CFO, even if I do consider myself the progressive partner. Where’s the return? Where’s the ROI? That’s what I hear… outside… and inside my head.

Customer loyalty is important for any business. The best way to improve loyalty is to understand and improve the customer experience. This is especially true in the hospitality industry because customer experience is the product. Customer feedback is a vital key in evaluating their experience and improving upon it. Here are some tips to help you get quality feedback.

One of the biggest concerns of hotels using social media is the dreaded negative review. No one likes to get one but the fact is, they are part of the industry and while you hope to minimize them, they will happen at some point.