April, 19 2011
HubSpot is a well-known online marketing and web analytics company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hubspot Inc. offers an all-in-one marketing software platform for small and medium sized businesses. Over 4,000 companies in 31 countries use HubSpot software to increase the number of visitors to their website and convert more of those visitors to leads and customers.
Just recently, HubSpot has been thinking of some ways to improve customer experience and having on hold messages that are interesting and fun for their customers while they are being put on hold was the primary focus. Other than creative messages, how do they improve their customers’ on hold experience? Choosing the right background music! HubSpot once chose the song MahNàMahNà for their customer support lines music on hold, and then realized that it didn’t work for their customers. Knowing how to choose the right music while your customers are on hold is one of the most crucial points in the area of telecommunications.
You see, it’s already annoying for customers to be put on hold and not many have the patience to wait for around 1 minute and listen to what customers think of as plain noise. So what you need to do is to choose hold music that you believe would make the customers waiting not feel like they are being put on hold for eternity. On hold messages become more entertaining when the music used as background is pleasant to the ears.
Make the on hold marketing message clear! ...The marketing message you need to get across to your customers is as equally important as the music. You can’t just come up with a message and let it play through your on hold messages – it is plain irritating. It is like listening to a robot blabbering non-stop at the other end. Aside from that, it also feels impersonal. While putting some sort of background music while messages are being delivered is the ideal method of putting the whole on hold messaging experience together, it is still best for your advertisement to be clear on what it wants the customer to know so that they won’t feel that their time is not wasted on being put on hold, but instead, they are given valuable knowledge that they can use in the future.
In the end, what we need here is the right mix of music and message to come up with the right on hold message experience. Remember that what we want to happen here is to make the customers feel entertained while being put on hold – not to make them hang-up and eventually lose them. On hold messages are important in advertising – do not make the customers feel that it should be taken forgranted.
For those interested, below are the two examples Hubspot have asked fans to inform them of which one they prefer to hear.