On Hold Marketing Services: The Top Four Challenges Facing Brands

On Hold Marketing services challenges can be overwhelming for national brands with multiple systems in multiple offices in multiple locations. How do you stay on top of the challenges and ensure that your company is out ahead of them?

Every day, On Hold Company Vice President of Sales Timothy Jackson talks to national brands facing challenges with their on hold messaging services. Here are the challenges he addresses most often – and the solutions he advises.

On Hold Marketing Services Challenge #1: Invisibility

Unless you pick up the phone and call your company, how do you really know what’s being played for your customers while they are on hold?

This message was brought home to me recently while dealing with a company with 200 locations. They were working with a different on hold messaging service and told me,

We tell them that we want a message played during specific hours at certain locations, but we don’t know if it’s actually getting done unless we call.

And no marketing manager has time to call 200 locations to ensure their instructions are being followed.

We use the term ‘invisible’ to describe the inability to know what message is being played on hold at any given time and at any specific location. And invisibility can be a real problem. For example, many of our customers want a specific message, music and voiceover playing on hold during the holiday season. But no one wants Christmas music playing January 2. However, invisibility can allow that to happen.

• Invisibility can create opportunity loss. You assume that you’re promoting a program across all of your marketing platforms, but because your system is invisible, you can’t be sure that’s happening. And if it’s not happening, you can lose the opportunity to re-enforce your promotion because it isn’t synchronized with your on hold messaging system.
• Invisibility can also affect brand consistency. Your customers in Cincinatti may hear one thing while customers in Dallas hear something else.
• Finally, invisibility can empower the rogue marketer in a distant location to change the message himself, leading to a breakdown in a cohesive marketing campaign.

Challenge #2: Difficulty to Manage

There are many factors that can contribute to this problem:

• If your on hold system relies on manual operations by employees who are occupied with multiple tasks or those working in remote locations, there’s a chance that someone will forget to change the message on the right date and at the right time.
• If you have multiple locations with various equipment types. You might have to mail 50 cassette tapes, 40 CD’s and 70 audio files to 160 different locations and hope that they arrive, get to the right person and that that person knows how to change the message.

These factors create a large margin for error making it nearly impossible to ensure a ‘go live’ date and time for your on hold messages.

Challenge #3: Lack of Standardization

Whether a company grows through acquisitions, mergers or new builds, the marketing manager can inherit equipment, vendors and out-of-date marketing messages. These “hand me downs” quickly turn into a standardization nightmare.

• Some phone systems will be easy to connect with while others won’t.  Some will require an external piece of hardware. Others won’t need hardware at all – just an audio file. Some will use tapes, some will use cds and others will use audio files, making message delivery cumbersome for the marketing manager.
• The more locations a company has and the more variety in equipment and delivery systems, the more potential for on hold messaging problems.
• In addition, when companies acquire and merge, they can bring with them their on hold messaging providers, decentralizing control of on hold messaging. When this happens, you’re taking an already difficult job and fracturing the work between various companies.

Challenge #4: Brand Uniformity

This may be the biggest challenge on this list and I’ll sum it up by giving two examples that I hear on a consistent basis:

Businesses are either struggling to ensure that their brand message is accurately and consistently deployed to all locations, or, They have multiple brands under their umbrella and there needs to be site specific messaging.

If you consider the challenges listed above, it becomes clear how difficult it can be to achieve brand uniformity without a robust enterprise level solution. Let On Hold Company help you overcome these on hold marketing challenges.