Easy On Hold, a distributor of Brandi Music, announces today that it has curated a music channel for on-hold queues that solves an issue for contact center managers: how to offer vocal hit music that doesn’t offend callers who are waiting on hold.
The channel, called Pop Smile, offers an enjoyable, positive listening experience for callers.
“We have interviewed hundreds of contact center managers, and they often cite callers’ negative feedback about certain songs as one of their chief problems to solve,” said Julie Brown (pictured), president and CEO of Easy On Hold. “Callers on hold are more focused on lyrics than they would be if that same song was background music in, say, a retail store. So, we can understand why contact centers are wary of offering any kind of vocal music, yet they don’t want to be limited to ‘safe but boring’ instrumental music.”
In creating the Pop Smile channel, Easy On Hold analyzed a broad group of hit songs over the last 60 years that had positive, uplifting messages and were free of suggestive phrases, promiscuity and innuendo, violence and drug use, name-calling and bullying as well as political points of view.
“Pop Smile is a great channel,” Brown said. “It makes you feel good just listening. It’s clean and trigger-free. Most importantly, it can put contact center managers at ease about playing it in their caller queues.”
Brown said songs that send the wrong messages and didn’t make the cut could be from all eras. Examples include classics like Killing Me Softly by Roberta Flack from 1973 to modern chart toppers like Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift from 2019.
“Don’t get us wrong; we love these songs and use some of them in our many channels, but not in Pop Smile,” said Brown. “Our song library reflects the wide range of subjects and sensibilities in the history of popular music, including contemporary music. For example, we would not take the beloved classic I Shot the Sheriff out of our ’70s channel, but you won’t find it in Pop Smile.”
Creating the Pop Smile playlist took Easy On Hold several months to locate popular songs across decades, read through the lyrics, listen to tempos and arrangements, and then score them to curate a channel that could bring out the best in the listener and put them in a great mood while waiting on hold.
“Nobody likes waiting on hold, but with this channel, we like to think we’re making the world a better place for callers and the call center agents who take all those inbound calls every day. Let’s put the callers in a good mood and make an agent’s day,” Brown said.
Pop Smile is one of more than 70 channels on Easy On Hold’s streaming music service, Brandi Music, for overhead and on-hold business use. Brown said four other channels also are “contact center friendly” for those call center managers who don’t want to offer up vocal songs:
- Bright Instrumentals
- Easy Instrumentals
- Jazz Masters
- Light Classical
“These four special channels feature original artists like Jim Brickman and Acoustic Alchemy, audience favorites who have been around for a long time and whose music is timeless,” said Brown. “For the contact center manager who wants better instrumental music than royalty-free or default phone system music, or illegally playing from someone’s playlist, these are great alternatives.”
Contact centers can mix and match up to four of Easy On Hold’s channels, potentially targeting the music to different hold streams (e.g., sales or support) or by caller profile. Proprietary algorithms ensure no repeats within an hour. Mixes also can be scheduled for any time of day, day of the week or extended periods such as holidays.
Curated Contact Center Music leverages Easy On Hold’s proprietary streaming service Streaming Queue Music (SQM), which replaces repetitive, inflexible queue music and messaging with automated, easily managed streams of custom audio content.
Curated Contact Center Music works with leading cloud and on-premises contact center platforms from vendors, such as Asterisk, Avaya, Bicom Systems, Broadsoft, Cisco, Fortinet, FreePBX, FreeSWITCH, Genesys, iPitomy, Mitel, OnSIP, Nextiva, Pure Connect, TPx, Vodia, Voneto, Yeastar and more.
Curated Contact Center Music is available immediately through Easy On Hold authorized sales representatives. For managed service providers or technical solutions distributors interested in partnering with Easy On Hold, visit https://easyonhold.com/resources/partner-program/.
For more information, visit Curated Contact Center Music.
