The message on hold business will just get bigger
In the 30 plus years the message on hold business has been in existence much has changed. Our first systems were cassettes in modified car cassette players. Long tapes with auto reverse did two things. It wore out the tape and it wore out the auto reverse mechanism. Along came CD burners. The machinery was expensive. The blanks were expensive and if you coughed during the cutting process you would end ups with a $25 coaster. Yes blanks were $25 EACH. Then came MP3 players. Ah the joy of no moving parts. Nothing to wear out and at long last some reliability. Fast forward to now. The advent of messages on hold for VOIP phone systems
The need for any sort of external message on hold player player is disappearing fast.
Telephone systems are getting smarter. With the advent of VOIP and what is essentially a phone connected to your internet modem we are seeing phone systems with some amazing capabilities. How about one internet connection to a building but 3 different phone systems connected to it. Each with its own messaging system. At voices.com.au we have had some unusual requests to create messages for different extensions within the one office. and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to guide callers to the different departments. Some businesses are even able to create messages aimed at their suppliers and play it to them depending what buttons are pushed on the IVR. What difference has this made to suppliers of telephone messaging? Well for one thing the writers are writing much more complex scripts and more scripts per client. Message on hold and IVR businesses will become digital suppliers only delivering via the internet and only ever supplying hardware by drop ship from places like amazon and eBay. Statistics say we spend 94% of our advertising dollars trying to get customers to ring us and just 6% on handling this callers. We will need to spend that 6% wisely to get the best return and capitalise on the 94%.
Before you think you have too long to wait check this out. The Vtech 4 line business system. For a few hundred dollars you have a fully functional phone system capable of handling four incoming lines. But! You can use it with only one. All the good facilities of small PABX at a fraction of the price. (Voices.com.au used this exact phone) And yes you can have message on hold.
Where will the future lead?
If you look at the past as a guide to the future you can see a time when the mobile held by the tradie will have all the facilities that the office phone system has. It will be a complete phone system with conferencing, messaging, and all of the other little toys bigger phone systems have now. Your humble small business person with no staff will have professional messaging on their phone so that they can have it professionally answered when they are up to their necks in a job. If you are looking to messages on hold for VOIP phone systems contact voices.com.au.