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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Creating the Itch: The Lasting Power of the Jingle

They’ve been around for as long as radio and advertising have existed. They are messages put to music; a clever way to tuck a targeted message inside a pleasurable tune. They’re jingles, or “rhymes or sounds in a catchy, repetitive format,” according to Mirriam-Webster’s Dictionary. Yeah, catchy and repetitive like a worm in your brain. It’s an ear worm, and if you’ve ever tried to dislodge one, you know how persistent they can be. Ever hear of a little ditty called “filet-o-fish,” courtesy of the McDonalds Corporation? You can thank me at 2:30am, when you’re desperate to fall asleep against an onslaught of singing large-mouth bass and the smell of fryer oil. You’re welcome.

The jingle’s power is in the slippery nature of the ear worm, and the chemistry between beat and brain is why the jingle has maintained its strong presence in advertising since the 1920s. Not every song has the power to be a worm – there are 3 qualities to a piece of music that increase its chance of gnawing away inside your mind for hours and days: Repetition, Musical Simplicity, and Incongruity. If the melody is one that repeats itself several times within the song’s length, your brain catches on to it like a child learns the alphabet – or a dog learns a trick. Repetition is biology’s education, which brings us to the quality of Musical Simplicity. Complicated compositions are, well, complicated and therefore our brain must work harder to memorize them. Simple rhymes and lyrics, however, are the key to idea-planting. Repeat the same simple sound 4 times in a row. Then, read a sentence aloud 4 times in a row. Observe which material is still in your memory bank later today, or even tomorrow. Here’s a hint, or shortcut for those who choose not to participate in the group activity with the rest of the class: It will be the simple repetition that wins over the sentence.

Finally, a musical piece with Incongruity is more likely to get “stuck” in your head than one that fits neatly into an automatic musical package. The brain abhors a puzzle – that is, a puzzle that has not been solved. Your mental biology will automatically try to fill in the intellectual vacuum. This is why, when your most annoying friend sings the first line of “It’s a Small World,” your mind starts a race to the finish of the song and you can’t do much about it. This is when you make a mental note to hum the melody of the Gilligan’s Island title song in your most annoying friend’s ear, as soon as possible. Incongruity also applies to a song that doesn’t stick to a predictable framework. Lyrics that emphasize one word, unpredictable melodies, and irregular musical timing all contribute to the likelihood that a song will burrow into your brain. Again: your brain hates an unsolved puzzle and will deliberately try to mimic the music and its exact irregularity. Your brain wants to work to hit those incongruities and to make sense of it all. It’s like a game of catch for your mind. This is part of why foreign languages are most easily learned, besides immersion, by listening to music in that language. Your brain wants to understand the lyrics and make sense of the song; the repetition of the music helps you remember the lyrics, so your brain can practice them over and over.

Let’s put these three qualities together, to illustrate why music works so well in advertising – and why the radio jingle will never die. If a song is repetitive, simple, and a part of it catches you off guard, you (the lucky listener) are doomed to repeat it to yourself. The filet-o-fish song is still in your head from when I mentioned it earlier, isn’t it? If not, don’t worry – I’ll put it back. “Give me that filet-o-fish, give me that fish…” uses a melody and lyrics that are almost painfully simple. Then, the song takes a strange and musically-uncomfortable turn. The catchy tune switches to what can only be described as a ridiculous time signature and lyrics that are so awkwardly-written that they sound like intentional kitsch. “What if it were you hanging up on this wall? If it were you in this sandwich you wouldn’t be laughing at all!” It’s annoying. It hurts my brain, but I can’t get it out. It makes me want a filet-o-fish, plain, with just ketchup.

Sources & Helpful Articles:
http://onlinewritingplaces.blogspot.com/2010/03/freelance-writing-101-why-you-should.html
http://www.uc.edu/news/kellaris.htm
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jingle
http://www.markethold.com

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