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Please Listen Carefully as Our Menu Options Have Changed
January 26, 2015
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. Call directors. No one likes them. After assuring you that your call is important to the business you've called, they tell you the menu options have changed (in hopes that you'll not end up bothering one of the minimally-trained, underpaid, understaffed humans on their end). And yet, it turns out there's something worse than getting a call director: getting nothing at all. For the second year in a row, we asked over 2,000 respondents in our NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study to agree or disagree with the idea that "Radio stations are very interested in your feedback and input." And, for the second year in a row, the results were not inspiring.
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Call directors. No one likes them. After assuring you that your call is important to the business you’ve called, they tell you the menu options have changed (in hopes that you’ll not end up bothering one of the minimally-trained, underpaid, understaffed humans on their end). And yet, it turns out there’s something worse than getting a call director: getting nothing at all.Â
For the second year in a row, we asked over 2,000 respondents in our NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study to agree or disagree with the idea that “Radio stations are very interested in your feedback and input.” And, for the second year in a row, the results were not inspiring.Â
We talk with program directors and managers every day who are passionately concerned about the ratings and performance of their stations and spend significant resources and energy gathering insights into the preferences and feelings of their constituents. But, what if one of those constituents wanted to communicate with the station directly? To answer that question, we assembled a small sample of radio stations: the top 10 music stations in a top 10 market. Our plan was to call the studio line for each one and tell them their station was doing a great job.Â
Ten stations yielded two phone conversations at two co-owned radio stations, where we got to tell the same person (answering for both stations) how much we liked one station and then, a few minutes later at another number, how much we liked the other station. What about the other eight? One has no studio phone number published on its website. Another keeps its studio phone number perpetually busy – we called many times, looking for times when no contests or other calls were being solicited. The remaining six were never answered; we called each multiple times and always let the line ring at least a dozen times. Overall, a clear message: your call is not important. We don’t care enough even to have a call director pick up and tell you that your call is important to usor that our menu options have changed.Â
So, we took to the Internet for contact and added the market’s two leading spoken-word stations into the list for good measure. Four of the music stations (co-owned) had no email addresses for any programming contact on their websites, but did have online forms to request songs. Does anyone at that company really believe that a listener will feel a sense of efficacy from clicking the boxes on these forms? Another station had no email address for a programming contact, nor any way to communicate with the station online. But, we emailed the other seven stations.Â
Threeof the stations we emailed sent kind, satisfactory replies within hours. The market’s leading spoken-word station sent a reply from an assistant and then a follow-up from the station’s program director. Perhaps it’s not surprising that these are three of the stations often vying for leadership in the market. The others? Three days later and as of this writing, still no reply at all.Â
The message from the majority is that we’re not very interested in feedback or input from listeners. Sure, one email or missed phone call doesn’t stack up very high within the cume of a radio station. But, given the viral nature of communication today, one missed contact can multiply pretty quickly. And, similarly, one strong contact can also multiply pretty quickly. Which way do you represent your station?
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