“We found a company that has a menu of pre-written content for our industry that we can pick from to create our Caller Experience Marketing productions whenever we want, and we can add our name to the messages.”
While it may seem crazy, there are on hold service providers that essentially go to market with this message: “Partner with us and we’ll make sure you deliver a completely generic call experience!”
Your target audiences are exposed to messaging of all kinds all day, every day. If what they hear from your organization is no different than what they’d expect, your Caller Experience Marketing will have the same impact as white noise.
Yet, the “generic messaging” model is quite lucrative for some of the biggest players in the On Hold space. Why? By simply repackaging the same content over and over for different clients, they’re able to present themselves as the low-price option.
Over the years, marketing departments of all shapes and sizes have been forced to allocate more responsibilities to fewer and fewer team members (sometimes resulting in a ‘department’ of one).
Marketers know they need Caller Experience Marketing, though I’ve been told by many in the past few years that the time it would take to develop content on a regular basis gets sacrificed to higher-profile initiatives and projects.
Likewise, very few providers are set up to take on 100% of concept development and production, so shared content becomes the appealing path of least resistance.
No big revelations there, right? Creating valuable, unique content usually requires investments of time and/or money.
However, a one-size-fits-all approach to Caller Experience Marketing (or any other channel) suggests that there’s no problem with positioning your brand in the exact same way as the competition, whether across town or across the country.
While helping hundreds of organizations design their programs, I’ve encountered many who reflexively believe there is a need to include phrases such as “Thank you for holding” and “Your call is very important to us.” Ultimately, those generic pleasantries serve no purpose other than to remind callers that they’re still on hold.
The ideal alternative includes thoughtfully executed custom content that encourages active listening, creates a memorable caller experience, and aims to accomplish defined program goals.
Whether entertaining callers with humor, bucking the traditional message-music-message format, or simply creating relevant copy that is 100% specific to your organization, Caller Experience Marketing will always be a more effective tool with unique content than with generic or shared content.
Listen to several different approaches to Caller Experience Marketing here.