We Never Put Customers On Hold

WARNING: This blog entry will hold you accountable as a marketer, business owner, executive, or even administrative assistant. If your feathers are ruffled, GOOD! Ruffle them below, in the comments section. This entry is designed to make you a more effective marketer, by shining a light on the dark corners of your strategy and holding you accountable for the customer interactions you don’t even realize you’re having.
“We never put our customers on hold.” When you say that to me, it’s all I can do to keep myself from blurting out, “Just how delusional are you? Are you seeing someone for that?”
Call me blunt or rude, but never call me dishonest. Think about what you’re saying here.
Do you mean to tell me that, as soon as the call is initiated, there is someone in your business who immediately picks up the line, with zero seconds of ring tone, every single time, without fail? Are you saying to me, with a straight face, that you force your customers to silently wait for 10-15 seconds of ring tone before dumping them on a soul-less answering machine? Are you comfortable with flushing 10-15 seconds of your precious marketing time down the toilet? What about those between-line calls and transfers? While your sales director is looking for an answer to the caller’s question, the caller is put on hold, so they won’t hear the paper-shuffling and muffled swearing that may or may not come with the pursuit of that answer. This is, perhaps, where a customer might spend the most time on hold. This is time wasted, if it is not time captured.
Now, let me ask you again. What do your customers hear when they call your office? If you do not know, I suggest you stop reading right this instant and call your own company. I am willing to bet that most of you have never done such a thing, and some of you are even blind to the benefit of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. Sometimes, the most obvious answer is the one we have the most difficulty finding. Sometimes, the simplest inquiry can lead to the most profound benefits. Call yourself, and see if you are or are not bored to tears while you wait for the line to pick up, wait for a connection to be made, or wait to leave a message. What do you hear when you call your office? If it is anything less than “an engaging message that keeps the caller on the line at all costs, because that call is important to our livelihood,” you’re doing it wrong. The truth is harsh, man.
Then, there are those who lack the ability to realize that they cannot do everything perfectly themselves – and that sometimes, just sometimes, professionals are the best at what they do professionally. If you sell paper, I’m sure you do not also have a degree in music production. Yet, so many think that both sound and their callers’ time are so unimportant that they can throw together a shamefully poor production, slap it on a tape in an answering machine, and call it message-on-hold. I cannot count how many times I’ve been told about how a company prefers to “do it [them]selves,” after suffering through an unbearably poorly-recorded on-hold message. I want to laugh, but sometimes you just have to let others make their own mistakes – repeatedly – until they realize that there truly is a better way to do some things.
Let’s say you think you’ll save $100 by recording a message yourself, using your own untrained, regional accent and the recording equipment that comes with your $50 answering machine. Let’s review some factual information. 7 out of every 10 callers will be put on hold, and 35% of those callers put on hold will NEVER call back after hanging up on you. Why should they? You don’t respect them enough to give them any value in their call. 94% of marketing efforts are directed at getting that customer to call (why else are you marketing? For public edification?), yet only 6% is spent on handling that call, once it is received. Are you serious? That’s like holding a grand opening for a restaurant, spending a fortune on ribbons and signs and advertising, then staffing only 6 servers to attend to your guests. You’ve saved $100, but you’ve wasted hundreds (perhaps even thousands) more in wasted marketing efforts, dropped calls, missed opportunities, and even lost customers that you once had. How does this make any sense? This is not a completely rhetorical question; I really want to know, because so many of you seem to think this is a good business practice!
Oh, but we play music for our callers while they wait for us to pick up the line. That should keep them happy. Are you sure you’re not asking for fines and possible jail time in the process of doing this? Never mind that customers stay on the line 25% longer with an on-hold message, compared to an on-hold background song (that cuts in and out most of the time, in my own personal experience). I’m talking about copyrights and licenses. You have no rights to any copyrighted music to which you do not own the copyright, and if you use someone else’s music in your on-hold time, you are breaking the law.
I am truly seeking discussion here. I want to make you angry with these pointed remarks, because at least then you’ll express some passion! Do you disagree with me? By all means, let me know; let the world know. Enlighten us. I have surveyed you, and a shocking 10% of you (approximate) truly believe that you owe nothing to your callers, because either you “never” put them on hold (these are exact words said to me) or there is no value in your customers’ on-hold time. I’d love for your customers to respond to that one. Hey, if you don’t care enough about me to not torture me on hold, I don’t care enough about your business to hand you my money. You’re not the only fish in the sea, baby. I’ll call someone who cares.

This conversation is not over!

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