calum's 'Hooked on Hold!' idea got me thinking. People trapped in phone answering systems are a perfect captive audience so, why not sell time on your call queuing system to advertisers? People, these days, are resigned to not getting anywhere fast whenever they phone up so replacing boring old muzak with a few money making adverts makes perfect sense. At least it does if your a heartless corporation that's more interested in making a quick buck than in good customer service and there's plenty of them about these days, aren't there. I'll start the ball rolling by fishboning this one myself, ok?-- DrBob, Nov 06 2003 (+1) We all need more advertisements!-- Jinbish, Nov 06 2003 "Buy the very best of 'Hooked On Hold!' direct from MFY Music Ltd! The first disc is yours for an incredible £3.99!"-- calum, Nov 06 2003 The service would generate sufficient revenues to hire enough call center support and reduce wait times....oh wait...-- davinic, Mar 27 2004 Almost all phone carriers' tech support call queue audio is stuffed to the gills with attempts to assure me how great their service is or to upsell me to more and better services.
This one's baked and left out on the counter to go cold again.-- land, Sep 08 2005 I think [davinic] was alluding to that a year ago [land]. People really like to spread out the annotations on this one don't they. Perhaps nobody will write anything after me until 2006. This was quite a poor attempt by [DrBob] in all fairness. Even he admits it.-- hidden truths, Sep 08 2005 Not at all, hiddentruths. Commercially, I think it's an excellent idea but I fishboned it because it's just a horrific concept. In answer to land's anno, I think that I should point out that it does say 'sell time to advertisers' in the idea not 'shamelessly promote your own company'.-- DrBob, Sep 08 2005 What [DrBob] just said. [-]-- wagster, Sep 08 2005 Perhaps individuals could sell time on their answer-phones to advertisers.
"Tired of annoying people as a telesales worker? Call (0123) 456789 and we'll be happy to find you a better one."-- Loris, Sep 08 2005 See! Loris has got the right idea.-- DrBob, Sep 08 2005 I noticed that my cable company at least used to do this. When calling support, I was asked for my phone number, supposedly to make the process more efficient. What really happened is that if I just waited, I got music, but If I entered my number, I got advertisements telling me how wonderful the experience would be if I upgraded to the next level of service.
"Tired of the selections on basic cable? Upgrade to expanded basic now, and get the following great channels..."
On a different line, I *-love-* the new "intelligent" answering agents. I've learned that they measure stress levels in the voice of the caller, and if the caller gets too agitated, it puts them through to an actual operator fairly quickly. Now, when I hear the familiar sickly-sweet voice say "tell me how I can direct your call", I just say, in my best "pissed-off" attitude, LET ME TALK TO A REAL F**KING PERSON, G*D D*MMIT!". It usually gets me through in seconds.-- Freefall, Sep 08 2005 Brilliant!-- sninctown, Sep 09 2005 Well, we seem to have solved the long-time-between-annos problem, don't we?
I think the halfbakery entry "Voice Mail Advertising" [http://tinyurl.com/azrc3] is what Lois was recommending.-- land, Sep 09 2005 random, halfbakery