You’re not a telephone technician? Not an “I.T.” person or interconnect professional? Relax. If you’re a business person looking for on hold message company, you don’t have to know everything about your phone systems. There are some questions, however, that you can help your on hold message provider develop a phone on hold system that works well every day.
Of course, the goal of the phone on hold message is to talk to callers who are waiting on-hold, offering ideas, news, promotions, solutions and other helpful information. If the callers can’t hear the audio or the content is not deployed properly, you can have a wasted opportunity, and investment. Easy On Hold founder and Technical Lead Tim Brown talks about phone systems in a new video found at easyonhold.com.
“We aren’t going to train our on hold message customers to be phone technicians,” Brown says, “but we are going to ask a few questions that will help us design an on hold system that is effective for their business.” This may include equipment, such as an on hold message player, or it may mean producing audio in a specific format (such as .wav or .mp3) for clients to use.
“It used to be that there were only two types of phone systems,” Brown explains in the video. “The PBX or Key system is a box that is on the wall in your business, in your phone room and all phones are connected to it.” The other is known as “analog” or “ordinary”. “These are the phones from the office supply store.”
But there is a problem with the less expensive 2 to 4-line small business phones. “They don’t allow any place to plug in music on hold; there’s no way to activate the music. There is no event to tell the music to start or stop.” For this reason Easy On Hold offers additional equipment that can be added to ordinary phones. “This equipment will solve the problem and create an on hold experience for callers, making your 2 to 4-line phone sound as though you have a more expensive system.”
Today there are two types of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phone systems that are becoming more popular for small to medium sized businesses. In one configuration, a traditional PBX phone system is still present on site at your business, while the voice carries over the internet to the telephone service provider. In this scenario, Easy On Hold will recommend the use of an external player for messaging on hold.
In the recently-released video, Brown says you may have the type of VOIP phone system that does not actually reside in your office. “You have phones that connect directly to the internet and your actual phone system is in the cloud, is off site. That makes it impossible for us to get equipment directly attached to the phone system because it is being provided off-site by your VOIP provider.” In these cases, Easy On Hold provides a specific audio file that can be uploaded to the off-site VOIP phone system. These files can be in a variety of audio file formats, such as .wav, uLaw, aLaw, .mp3 and others.
“We have a way of working with each of the types of phone systems,” assures Brown, who explains, “This is why we ask you a little about your phone system.”
So it’s nice to know you don’t need to spend too much time studying technical reports. A phone call to a music on hold expert will save you time and get you a set up that makes your business sound great.
