Customer Service Excellence: Is Your Hold Music Holding You Back?

Music is amazing. We use it to enhance the mood, bring back lost memories and even form new ones. But, when it comes to on hold music, the wrong choice can be extremely effective in driving away customers.

Why Bad On Hold Music Is Bad For Business!

Your clients’ time is valuable. They’re choosing your business for their needs, when they could go to any one of your competitors. So when they call you, it’s imperative to make their time as pleasant and worthwhile as possible, even when they’re waiting on hold to speak to you.

Bad on-hold music puts customers in a bad mood. At best, they’ll be irritable when they finally speak to you or one of your customer service associates. This makes for a bad transaction for all involved—the customer is frustrated at having been forced to listen to the music. That bad on-hold music in turn, puts callers in a bad mood and ruins their entire customer service experience.

Even worse, bad hold music can drive a customer to hang up. In fact a benchmark study by Dialogtech shows that nearly 20 percent of callers with a bad on hold experience, hang-up at around 40 seconds. So they hang up and call someone else for their needs. You’ve just lost out on business. The Beryl Institute found that 75% of people who abandon calls do not call back and call a competitor.

Bad music while they’re on-hold says that you just don’t care enough to provide callers with decent quality audio while they wait. And these days, when your customers think your on-hold music stinks, they aren’t going to keep quiet about it which can cost you even more business.

They’ll take to social media and tell their friends, their family, and followers. There’s even a platform onholdwith.com, which is a free service that tracks and posts complaints about waiting on hold (#onholdwith).

How The Right On-Hold Music Has A Positive Impact

Your clients’ time is valuable. They’re choosing your business for their needs, when they could go to any one of your competitors. So when they call you, it’s imperative to make their time as pleasant and worthwhile as possible, even when they’re on hold waiting to speak to you.

You need to know your target market and pick your hold music accordingly. It’s very unlikely that a 50-60 year old rural woman will want to listen to the latest rap jams, and it’s rare that the 18-25 urban set wants to hear classic country tunes. But the style of music isn’t the final straw in what makes or breaks your customers’ willingness to wait: it’s quality!

What makes for good on-hold music? Good on-hold music is relevant to your customers and properly matches your brand. Actually, good hold music isn’t just music alone! Survey after survey concludes that music on hold with custom branded messages is the most preferred on hold experience by callers.

In fact, a survey by NICE Systems found that 88% of callers surveyed want to hear product information on-hold and will stay on the line longer if provided with this information. An Infomax Group survey also concluded that callers stay on the line up to 25% longer when provided with music on hold and messaging versus “dead air” or “canned background music,” and up to 17% longer than radio. And if that’s not enough to wet your appetite, a study by Sales & Marketing Management shows that roughly 20% of callers have purchased additional products based on information they heard while on-hold.

The Bottom Line! Don’t Let Your Hold Music Hold You Back.

As a business owner or manager, it’s not something you regularly experience for yourself. You don’t call your business on a regular basis, so the customer experience for callers is usually out of sight, out of mind. But its lack of visibility doesn’t mean that it should be overlooked.

Music on hold and messaging is an effective tool used to communicate information about your business, that educate your callers about how you are different, more innovative, and better than any of your competitors. It keeps callers on the line longer, creates a positive customer experience, builds customer loyalty and creates happier customers. Don’t ignore the value of this important connecting point for your business with bad hold music.