I HATE Music on Hold
October 28th, 2008 by Ingrid Cliff
Many governments and business get music on hold for their telephones. Personally I hate Greensleeves chimes only slightly less than “your call has progressed in the queue and your call is important to us” as you know darn well that if they really cared they would employ more staff so you are not left hanging for 40 + minutes.
The other day I had to laugh when put on hold for the umteenth time for one Local Government office I was greeted with “Killing me softly with his song”. Either the programming company had a very wicked sense of humour or it was one of those delicious mistakes.
Have any of our readers had any other pet on hold hates or delicious mistakes they would like to share?
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under small business tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 29th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
There’s a show on ABC2 called “People Watchers”. They did an experiment with hold music and found the more up tempo music had people thinking they were on hold for less time… it’s an interesting show, and it was an interesting experiment.
May 12th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
With a background music while on hold callers will have perception of not waiting too long.
August 19th, 2010 at 1:13 am
I hate music on hold. It’s one of those technology tricks that is done just because it is possible, then the reasons are made up, usually involving some assumed perception like “it seems like you’re not waiting as long.” How is this valuable, even if it were true?
Before the days of music on hold, and the equally pointless periodic “your call is important.” updates, I used to simply put the phone on speaker and work on something else until the service desk eventually responded. When they said “may I help you” I could then pick up the headset and proceed. I could even listen to my own music in the meantime. Music on hold does not help me; rather, it prevents my using this time productively.