On-hold music is to music as Velveeta is to cheese! The culprits for bad on-hold music are purveyor inattention, inadequate tech, and crappy files.
We’ve all called into customer service at one time or another and spent 15 minutes listening to awful hold music. We’re not talking about the taste in music. No, we’re talking about the hold music that often sounds like a poorly tuned FM station being pulled in with tin foil. You know the type. It stops so often that you get ready to speak because the pause makes you think a customer service rep has picked up, only to be blasted with another chorus of scratchy pop music.
In fact a recent article at notebook.com discusses “why hold music sucks!”... The article explained that most recorded music is not produced to sound good over telephone speakers, speakers that are programmed for the range of the human voice. Therefore, a good bass line for the Black Keys or the highest register of Mariah Carey could be swallowed whole by your telephone on hold button.
Telephone systems aren’t designed to carry music, they’re optimized for voice not music. Further complicating this issue is the fact that the music is also not “optimized” for phone systems. Fully produced music just isn’t going to sound right. If the music isn’t optimized for the telephone on hold system, then you can experience clipping, which happens when a frequency overloads the system, leading to static and crackling.
While there are technical reasons as to why the hold music you hear is often so poor, but there’s another reason why hold music suffers. According to a Heartbeats International survey only 38% of companies have a strategy for how they sound, which includes how they sound when you are on hold waiting to talk to them.
So one of the biggest problems -- the fact that many companies just don't give a hoot about how they sound on hold!... How many times have you experienced the disconnect between the message that "Your call is very important to us" and the sense that you could wait on the phone until the Earth falls into the Sun and still no one would answer? The same type of inattention leads companies to use on-hold music that is inappropriate to the business, poorly performed and recorded, and sloppily integrated into the system.
for those companies who do care about delivering quality audio marketing messages for their on hold listeners professional message on hold equipment is highly recommended. Bad on-hold music is like a house with rusting cars on blocks in the front yard: the customer's impression of your company is going to be negative before they even step in the front door, Music on hold player are designed to provide optimize audio, giving your business both crystal clear sound quality, as well as maintenance free operation. Music & Message on hold players have auto-restart so even in the even a power loss occures, audio begins immediate playback once power is restored. Today's digital on hold players come with a variety of choices depending on how technical you want to get. Some hold players still use older tape or cd's, but newer units play audio files from sd cards or usb flash drives, and there are also on-hold players that can connect to your local network for remote loading of audio productions.
When studies show that 70% of callers are placed on hold (AT&T) ....of which 88% prefer on hold messages to radio, music or silence (MaxiMarketing) ..... combine that with the fact that 16-20% of callers make a purchasing decision based upon information heard while on hold (Call Center Magazine) ... and that when used properly on hold messages has proven to show an increase sales by more than 25% (GlobalComm) ...one would tend to think more companies would want to take a bit of care with their on-hold music and begin to cultivate a good image instead???