Writing is hard. For our copywriters, it takes mastery to write excellent F.
To most people, writing is a grueling communication skill best left for the esoteric nerd, the patient wanna-be writer, or even for the bored housewife. It’s harder than speaking. Period.
Now, I’m not going to make you look at writing from a negative point, especially when you’re planning to write a message on hold scripts for your business. As a matter of fact, I’ll give you easy tips in making one. Not just generic tips for writing a bland copy, but seven smart tips for creating persuasive and tolerance-inducing on hold script.
Unlike advertisements broadcasted through traditional media, your callers don’t really expect to hear an ad when they call you. Now what do we do with that? Surprise them- entertain, inform, educate!
How do you exactly do that without wasting your callers’ valuable time? How do you take their undivided attention as the perfect opportunity to up sell your brand?
7 Smart Tips For Creating Message On Hold Scripts
Tip #1: Know Your Callers
Creating a caller profile easily helps you to come up with ideas on how you should structure your on hold script. This enables you to understand their needs more and come up with a message that speaks for their group personality.
Through market research and segmentation, you’ll identify your caller demographics that would result into creating a script that reflects to their collective behaviors and speech accents. These are two important factors to use in getting your message delivered right across your customers.
You don’t want lumberjacks to hear an ostentatious female voice over the phone describing the good parts of your chainsaw product, right? From this point I bet you already knew what I really meant with tip #1.
Tip #2: Generate Content Ideas
This process is best achieved through the collaboration of your marketing team and customer service representatives. Schedule a brainstorming session wherein suggestions from these two groups would be greatly solicited.
The marketing team, being the idea factory for your business, can suggest by including your current or upcoming sales and promotions of products and services in your on hold message. Information about your internet presence through blogs, websites, and social media accounts can also help your callers know more about your company.
On the other hand, the people tasked to be in the frontlines of representing your business can add ideas by including answers to frequently asked questions and providing information on how to further contact you by other means.
Beware. Callers who are put on hold can’t tolerate piles of information being fed to them, which leads us to tip #3.
Tip #3: Avoid Information Overload
Your callers are there to seek solutions to their problems, not to listen to a barrage of lengthy content. They’re doing you the favor of waiting, so you might as well make your message on hold scripts short, clear, and concise to seemingly cut down their holding time.
Provide nuggets of information that they can easily absorb. It may be short but you must never forget to focus on your purpose and make it catchy and appealing to the callers. It’s best to know first the average holding time of callers before deciding to trim off the excess in your message. You don’t want to repeat your message again and again.
Tip #4: Kill Your Darlings
“Kill my darlings? What psychopathic tip is that?”
Yeah, seriously, kill your darlings. They’re the words you’ve been bragging to say, words that are made of fanciful and pretentious language. Like your beloved jargons and whatnot.
Industry jargons are the layman’s main enemy. As an expert in your current field, you might have a firsthand knowledge on these terms, but to an ordinary person they are complex mathematics.
If you must include such words in your script, be sure to include their definitions for your callers to understand them well. Of course, to save time and avoid confusion, use simple words that may replace these jargons. You don’t want your callers reaching out to you from a very dark place.
Tip #5: Include Call To Action
The science of performing an effective sales pitch through your message on hold scripts lies within a proven step by step procedure.
The first line of your message must attract.
Your second is to inform.
And the third line should bear a call to action.
These three elements send a sense of urgency to the callers that they can barely resist as the time of waiting is about to end. When you finally take their call, the last thing that got stuck in their memory would be most likely to be entertained by their decisions.
Tip #6: Proofread Your Script
Upon the completion of your draft, don’t forget to proofread your message on hold scripts to eliminate grammar and structure errors. Act ruthless in approaching this process, as if you didn’t write the script yourself. This shuns you away from being bias with your work and helps you easily spot mistakes and awkward phrases. Set the tone of your script to your brand so callers can simply identify with your message. Write for your customers, not for yourself.
Tip #7: Choose Professional Voice Actor
As you reach the last step of developing your message on hold scripts, it’s time to give it the voice it deserves. It’s the kind of voice that your targeted callers can greatly relate with, a voice that they have no problem listening to. Look for that voice that you’ve been hearing in your head while you were making the script. Think of the voice over talent you’ll be choosing as your new brand ambassador or your virtual receptionist.
A truly successful message on hold program molds your company’s brand image, intensifies your marketing and sales approach, and provides an exceptional customer service to your callers. That’s a mouthful of words, but I guarantee that you can get them all if you avail of this cost-effective marketing tool.
There are no other better ways to do it than by producing an award-winning message on hold scripts that is carefully crafted to perfection. Simply call us or go to our website, and you can have an excellent script in a short time.