Does anyone have any suggestions with regards to do's and don'ts for hold music for call queues?

Leanne -

I'm sure you'll get some good responses on this one. This is actually a topic where you can get fun and creative. For example:

One client of ours is a resort vacation reservation company. Their hold music, it was decided, should be festive. Salsa music, Bob Marley, stuff like that, to get the client in the right frame of mind to buy.

Another client is an inbound customer complaint group. It was decided that their hold music should be soft and soothing, instrumental stuff only.

Most businesses use a generic 'elevator music' kind of thing, and pepper it with updates on hold time, and perhaps even topical advertisements for new or upcoming products.

Best case scenario, though, is that the customer *never* has to hear any hold music, because they are never on hold!

Brent

With hold music it's not a case of what people like it's a case of what is least likely to offend. Now I may have my data slightly screwed up here but I read that most likely to offend is generic elevator music, followed by the good old four seasons (from a hold point of view anyway) greensleeves was not best recieved either.
The most popular/least unpopular was the Beatles.
Not obviously suitable for some customer bases but in the majority of cases this was the prefered option. I tried this and it worked very well, and proved quite popular. I try to change the music every one to three months (depends how bust I am) and currently we are running a combination of the Stereophonics, Crowded House and Cheryl Crow. New music due soon.
Consideration has been given to putting messages in the music (adverts) but this has generally been dismissed as customers shouldn't be on hold long enough for it to be effective.
Personally, I hate bland and inoffensive hold music, I would rather have something with a bit of class than generic rubbish but then in a previous life I was a proffesional Musician and sound engineer...
Just to finish, a few very poor choices of hold music - Help by the Beatles springs to mind as does Hanging on the Telephone! But my 2 favourites have to be the theme from a fistfull of Dollars for a building company and Stairway to heaven for, wait for it, a funeral director....

My companny has a range of different solutions for your music on hold problem.
We can provide you with non-copyright or copyright music and the units to play them from.We are B.T'S preffered supplier for a renge of products including call handling,voice recording ,call logging and of course music on hold.
Have you thought about having a personalised greeting?
It is quite inexpensive at only £400 for the unit and message or just £199.00 if you already have a player.
Please get in touch with me if you require any further information

I replied directly to Leanne earlier, but for the forum's use here is what I said:

I'm over here in the 'States, but what we look for is a neutral accent. Here in the states that is easiest to find in California or the Mid-West, but anyone who has moved alot generally develops it. However, if the person enunciates words clearly and does not use slang, an accent is not a real problem.

We also sometimes match the accent to the client. One of our clients was an international handmade artifacts dealer. For them we used a person with a soft Indian/English accent. This gave the flavor of something exotic while still being very clear. I know that Gateway computers uses a countrified accent on their IVR.

I am not aware of the public perceptions/stereotypes of the various regions of the UK. I'm sure that others on the 'voice would be able to help with that analysis.

Another thing to consider is whether to use a male or female voice. Some reports show that female voices are reacted to more positively, but I believe it depends on the industry (and I would assume the countries involved). For our insurance, banking and technology clients we use a male voice, but for customer service and sales applications we use a female voice.

Hold Music is also very much driven by the application and also the length of time you expect the person to be on hold. For most applications I would recommend using something 'airy' and elegant (like classical music). However, this can get very monotonous if you expect the person to be on hold more than a minute. For longer hold times I would recommend something more upbeat (like smooth Jazz). For very long hold times (3+ minutes), it would probably be best to contract with a Muzak firm.

Make sure that you look into the music copyright laws there in Scotland. Here we need to use 'public domain' or royalty free music or get a special license from the artist/producer.

Our generic hold music selection I purchased from www.davenportmusic.com.

Included part about voices too... Sorry

You need permission from the PRS and/or MCPS in the UK to reproduce most music. Prepaid stuff is available bu it is a bit cruddy.

A certain British Supermarket Chain a couple of years
ago did a tie in with a Charity (NSPCC I think) and actually had
short comedy skits as their on hold.

I've haven't come across this since but it was a welcome
change as I was waiting about 15 mins as I REALLY needed to talk to someone.

The only drawback of this was does anyone know the end to Gryf Rhys Jones's
story about the bear lost in the woods?

Another thought to consider when choosing hold music which I haven't seen mentioned yet: it's good to remain as mindful as possible of political-correctness and cultural sensitivity issues. I've heard of centres fielding complaints from non-Christian customers around the holidays for playing the more, shall we say, theologically-intensive Christmas carols as hold music. A better choice than "O Holy Night" might be, say, "Jingle Bells." It may not seem like a major issue, but we're all in the business of trying to ensure our callers are happy, and we'd certainly want to avoid situations where we might accidentally offend.

Once I rang the Avaya tech helpdesk & I swear they were playing 'You just keep me hanging on!'.

I told their staff & surpise, it was never there again! - it had my office in stitches though when put on the loudspeaker. I guess it's not too bad when it's 'within the industry' but they are meant to be good at this call centre thing!

From personal experience I listened to a call the other day, and had a miffed customer who didn't think it was appropriate for us to play "Have A Nice Day" when he'd been waiting 10 minutes to get through!

I know I'm a bit late to be tagging onto the bottom of this thread, but only found this website today (and spent all afternoon reading and not working!)

Our call centre is currently facing huge calls in queue, with call waiting times of up to 45 minutes at peak times.
Obviously, recruitment is our prime concern, but training takes about 4-5 weeks before our staff are anything like operational.

I'm also working on another project to provide proactive advice around card fraud, and thought this may hit 2 birds with 1 stone. Does anyone know whether a customer's motivation to hold is increased if they are listening to something they find interesting? My view is that a caller would be less likely to abandon, but it would be nice to hear other experiences.

TIA guys,
Gareth

Our call centre is currently facing huge calls in queue, with call waiting times of up to 45 minutes at peak times.
Obviously, recruitment is our prime concern, but training takes about 4-5 weeks before our staff are anything like operational.

Gareth,

With no knowledge of you operation(!), I would wonder whether recruitment should be your priority. I would start with an analysis of demand. When and why people call. And devide the whys into value and failure demand (value: they want to use the service, failure: they used it but you messed up somehow and they want to have it fixed or complain about it).

Also, a demand analysis might identify that a majority of your calls are about a small set of things. Then you can train people on those things and shorten the inital training before they are productive. Then add other skills later.

You will be surprised at how many operations increase the number of calls they receive by continuing to not address the causes of failure demand. The difficult part is that the causes are often not in the call centre, but in another part of the business.

Dear Rachel,

At the moment, we have an independent MP3 player that drives our waiting music but - as we get calls from all over Europe - we are looking for songs/playlists that are "open" to a very broad customerspan.

Would you be so kind as to contact me on Kris.Meuleman@volvo.com ? I read your company offers business solutions in that domain and we might find some common ground ...

Br,

Kris

We're looking at lean fundamentals at the moment, with some interesting (but unsurprising results)
Our findings are showing at the moment that our main problem is down to "dirty hand-offs". In effect, we'll need to increase the amount of work we do, which should reduce failure demand in the long term. The problem with lean is, you often need to have some short-term pain to get the long term results, hence getting some extra staff.

We're also shipping some of our calls off to Customer Relations, as we've found that the demand we get on some calls doesn't fit with out overall purpose. The Q messaging thing is designed primarily to give customers advice about fraud prevention, but we thought a biproduct of this would be a stronger motivation to hold.

I could talk about 'lean' all day, but would probably bore 99% of everyone who reads this!

Gareth,

Glad you are doing some Lean work. Glad I am not the only one.

I would be interested to find out why you are having short-term pain. You if you have a backlog, you still have to work it off, Lean can't get round that, but in the cases I have seen, no extra staff have been needed.

Your second paragraph interests me. If you are shipping off calls that means you are still receiving them. Thus they are still work for you.

I would be keen to hear your experiences with the Lean work and learn something from it. If you want to email me on rob.worth@worthsolutions.com I would be interested to hear from you.

Best regards,

Rob