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.
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.
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eTraining
Another emerging market for Holdcom is eTraining, also known as virtual learning or just-in-time training. Holdcom supplies voices and scripts for professional businesses that need their staff to learn something new, and fast: for example, updated software or a novel technology.
Senior Script Consultant Rob Lefever created several “script tips” for a successful eTraining program. It is important to “understand your objective and know your audience. Keep the focus of your script – a good way to do this is to put yourself in their shoes, and don’t assume they know everything you know.”
Another important factor of eTraining is “keeping it simple. An eTraining script should be easy for a voiceover to record…keep it concise and to the point. Don’t forget that an important area of eTraining is situational comparisons: you want to teach them the right and wrong ways to deal with a problem so they’ll know exactly what to do and not to do.”
With more people taking courses online, eTraining will become vital to securing a company’s future.
As a side note, this is a fun “eTraining” video where a fictional character named Donny teaches his youtube followers how to “properly” use Photoshop. It’s called “You Suck at Photoshop” for a reason – he insults the viewer constantly and often breaks into rants about his ex-wife who left him, his terrible job, and more a la Office Space. It is hilarious and also very informative – it uses all the proper eTraining techniques, such as showing examples, knowing your audience, and holding the viewer’s attention.
Guest Blog contributed by Scripts Consultant Megan Andriulli
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.
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.
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:
Last night, my mother told me to check my email, and I knew from the poorly disguised grin that I had another gimmicky “greeting card” waiting for me. The cards tackle the human psyche as if we are creatures of binary emotional existence: vulgar humor or molasses-sweet.
Interactive Voice response or IVR, is a form of human-computer interface which takes its input from voice and keypad commands. Compared to a phone menu, call tree, or automated attendant, an Interactive Voice Response system is put in place to actually receive data, process it, and deliver meaningful value to the customer.