At no time in the 1980’s was it envisaged that the life of the On Hold service, or the development of Interactive technology, would thrive for decades.

In fact the On Hold industry still grows and is an unfulfilled market place – and it's 24 years since this company innovated the idea of Message On Hold in the mid 80’s.

So it is hard to predict exactly what will happen with the present form of On Hold services long into the future. However, there are some logical points to make which will give you an idea of how to think about the industry and what it may bring you in the future.

Firstly, we must consider the current and future technologies, then integrate this with the elegance of their design, and the compelling needs of the community to embrace them.

This leads to what peoples want when they make a phone call to business and government, and what market forces drive people to interact as they do...   read more...

Governing all factors for the future of this industry is the cost of technologies and their payback (ROI) lead times.

Now add to the above the motivations of industry and governments for productivity at the expense of the prospective sanity of the community. Not to be too glib, this point is about how much duty of care organizations feel for their customers – meaning, how much will the business community really invest in the highest quality communications techniques and technologies? We hear a lot currently about customer service, but all too often don’t get it.

Further, how much will organizations invest in adequate numbers of persons to handle customer enquiries – more to the point, when will they?

To be clear about one key matter, there is a difference between customer perceptions, their needs and their actions in response to an experience.

This is in fact important to understand and is largely to do with a person’s expectations. Market forces can drive persons to accept the inevitability of say, a wait in a queue – and these forces can be manipulated by organizations, industries, community groups, governments etc. But at the same time, a person may not like waiting in the queue – yet they are expected to wait – so they do wait and eventually their needs are fulfilled, and their perceptions of the service quality are influenced by the fact that they expected to wait.    

The above example leads to a ‘so be it’ mentality which will allow technologists to bring to the market productivity initiatives which may be accepted in the market when they are not necessarily in the best interests of the consumers/customers.

Interestingly, what we think may not happen, may very well be what does happen and therefore be the path for the future. Funnily enough, this is really what happened with the On Hold industry – we just did not expect it to have such continuum and longevity.

So let's try to make some predictions with the above factors in mind.

Firstly, there is likely to be substitution. This is when one approach is superseded by another, not necessarily from the same foundation. In this industry for example, an auditory product (phone) could be replaced with an audio visual device – and perhaps a portable one at that.

In which case, the On Hold companies would very quickly want to become providers of audio visual services to survive.

Another good example is the greater use of the internet for information – think of how we now buy products over the internet without having to make a phone call. This is classic substitution.

Probably, in fact, the internet poses the greatest threat to the On Hold Industry.  Yet the counter to this is that many indications are that telephone calls will not diminish proportionately to the growth of internet use. This is in part due to the timeliness of information access, the immediacy of need and the desire for people to speak to each other. Will this change? – hmm, trust is a big thing with people, and talking to someone brings soul, well being and other ‘human factors’ to the table.

Probably, telephone calls will become a bit more of a personal communication tool and for business, technologies that provide quick information access – with portability – will become the way the community interacts.

The issue is, when will things change - at least to the extent that the On Hold industry is really threatened? Well, it is clear that corporate and government locations want and need to put people On Hold, and they need and want to use, whatever automated voice services are available, to enhance their customer relationships and communications.

What is likely to happen is that calls will be made through audio visual means, and it is likely callers will have to wait in queues. There may be a diminished number of calls, but our reading is that the fundamental criteria associated with the act of calling will prevail.

So the On Hold experience will likely become an audio visual one, with presentations mostly relevant to the host organization. It is possible that these presentations may be interactive and act to support the web and internet offerings. Think of it in terms of the ‘hold’ experience offering options, via your voice input, which will allow callers' choice and possibly quick answers to questions about which they calling in the first place.

In a sense this is the age of designing ‘intuitive systems’ – those information services that can interact to the point of understanding a customer needs without human intervention.

So really, we think the issue for the future is about the speed of information access, limited mainly by the cost of the technologies to achieve same. We believe the change will be slower than the technology innovation itself, due to cost, human factors, community acceptance, market force and other commercial factors.

What does this mean for your organization? Get on with optimizing your On Hold service today: make sure your service provider is a market leader; deal only with experts for advice and focus on optimizing your customer experience when using any audio or audio visual service to represent your interests.

If you would like to comment on any of the above ideas, or contribute to the debate, please click here.