Everyone hates hold music–not because of the music, but because they’re on hold. However, telecom companies have done studies that seem to show that people hate the combination of hold and silence even more; some kind of audible anchor (music, messages, choices, whatever) has been shown to be associated with people waiting on hold for longer periods.
As a side issue, there are networks that check for dead air and disconnect calls that are silent for too long. I don’t know how commonly used this feature is now, but hold music and other audio anchors can prevent this automatic disconnect.
I don’t think most people hate hold music because they hate being on hold. It’s because it’s always bad music. It’s the type of music you play in elevators and such. But, at least there, it’s not something you have to actually listen to. But that’s what you have to do while you wait on the phone.
I’d suggest they make better music, but, given the reminders about checking their website: they try to make it unpleasant, so that, if you don’t really need to call, you’ll hang up. I’ve heard stories of intentionally adding wait time just to discourage people from calling.
The best (?) is hold music when the internal phone system is IP based, and a good percentage of the packets are routed via Mars, or further. Static, flange and dropouts are hallmarks of a truly crappy phone system.
I’ll go you one better: packets looped multiple times through the Mars route, in the nine circles of Hold Hell.
I was trying to cancel a very old credit card account; it had been a promotional card with some bonuses that were useful to me, but circumstances had changed, and I no longer used it. So, I called the number on the card, got the expected menu, made my selection, and got the expected tinny music. I waited.
And waited. And checked bank locations and timezones, to see if I had called during some hyperextended lunch hour. I hung up and called back at a different time. Menu. 53 repetitions of “Interlude with Strings in Tin Cans at 10,000 Feet”.
I hung up and tried again, this time doing the “press ALL the buttons” thing to try to get an operator. To my surprise, 8 eventually took me to a live person. It was to their surprise, too, because they weren’t aware that their company had ever issued credit cards. The helpful live person went off to check on things, and found a number for the group that handled legacy accounts. The helpful live person transferred me to the number.
Menu. Tinny music, now slightly crackly as well. Pressed 8 and explained the situation. Helpful live person looked up a number for the legacy group’s supervisor and transferred me.
Menu. Tinny music crackling in the middle distance. Helpful live person, still determined to be helpful, finds a number for someone in accounting who should be able to help.
Menu. Tinny music now seems to be coming through a string from another tin can, possibly somewhere near the seashore. Helpful live person has gone off-shift, but helpfully left a note for the next helpful live person, which was good, because we had trouble hearing each other. New helpful live person finds a number they think is new.
Menu. Tinny music. Something is breathing on the line. hhhhhssssSSSSsss NHLP seems disturbed, but game. Finds a paper phone directory for the company and starts going down the list of numbers in the legacy department.
Menu and tinny music, almost lost in the static. There may be voices in the hissing. NHLP doesn’t even ask, just transfers me to the next number on the list. I’m determined to see how deep this rabbit-hole goes.
Menu almost inaudible, only bits of high-pitched violin get through. There are definitely voices. NHLP seems to be shouting, trying to be heard, and I’m doing the same. The voices are louder.
No menu, no music, just static. I press buttons anyway. LOTS of voices. Some of them are mine. One may have been NHLP, I couldn’t tell. Either way, we were clearly committed to the ritual at this point.
Dead air. I said, “Hello?” into the silence. Several seconds later, my own voice whispered back, very faintly, “Hello?”
So, have you tried using the card? Do they even have a billing department anymore? Possible unethical free stuff, if they have no way to bill you!
Alternatively, if they’ve sold off that part of the company (which seems likely), when you get the bill in the mail for the candy bar you bought at the gas station, it may have a more useful phone number on it.
You’re lucky. When I had a job that had me calling insurance companies many times a day, one of them interrupted their hold music with “advice”. There were four repeating insurance or medical blurbs, one of which was a suggestion to schedule your yearly PAP test. If they weren’t backed up too badly, I’d only hear the PAP blurb twice. If they were . . . about the eighth cycle I was mumbling inside: ‘get your mind out of my crotch and answer your phone?’
A former employer’s teleconference provider had “hold music” if you were waiting for the conference to start, generally by waiting for the call organizer to call in. For a while it was a feed of SiriusXM’s Classic Vinyl station, which made the waiting bearable. Unfortunately, Tom Petty’s “The Waiting” was on Classic Rewind, so we never got that coincidence.
I actually called back the next day with a different approach and figured out what was going on–instead of accounting, I asked for their PBX administrator. By that time, the story of the “haunted” call was already making the rounds, and they knew who to connect me to. Once I was talking to another phone guy, we worked out what happened:
The company that had issued my card got bought out, becoming a department of the larger company, then the people in it gradually got laid off or left on their own. As people left, the previous PBX admin had forwarded their numbers to whoever took over their duties…then when that person left, forwarded their numbers in turn. Eventually, the whole department was shuttered, and the number for the last person out got forwarded back to the general customer service number…which was programmed to call that department if someone called in and entered one of the legacy account numbers. And no one ever reassigned the old numbers or removed the forwards.
So, each time the helpful live persons transferred me to a number in the ghost department, the IVR forwarded me through every other number assigned to the department, and eventually back to the general line, where the whole thing started over, only with a couple dozen more links in the chain each time. It only ended when the IVR ran out of resources and had a nervous breakdown–it literally ran out of hold music.
The PBX guy found someone in accounting who could look up the old legacy records, switched the IVR to forward to them, and I called on another line to verify that it got me to someone who could close out the account. (He probably spent another couple of days going through the IVR and PBX, cleaning up the mess.)
My old department was one of several help desks on one number. We were option 6. The primary tree scripting was recorded by a professional voice actor who was known as “the Disney Voice” because he did the phone trees for the Mouse. That guy managed to make password resets for debit card PIN pads sound fun.
When I rule the universe, the person who makes the decision of what callers will hear when they are on hold will be required to spend 20 minutes a week on hold with their own company.
actually aol had the best music for a while when everyone used the aol client because when time warner owned them they started their own radio “stations”(it was like pandora) which was entirley the back catalog of warners music companies
WEll when you called aol they used your “master” screen as id name and would match it to your favorite radio station … I thinl they let sirruis xm take it over if they still have it
Back in the day, Novell had “hold jockeys” who would play music, interspersed with “traffic reports” listing the number of people in each hold queue, so you could judge your wait progress. It was great, and during a tour of the Novell facility we saw the hold jockey studio, a glassed-in booth in a corner of the cubicle farm. But, it cost money and was eventually cut.
I pretty much agree with the OP. I also agree with Mr Shine that one doesn’t want silence either. The best solution would be Brian Eno’s ambient compositions. Nonzero sound but completely unobtrusive. Eno is God.
I work on phones, assisting the hearing impaired, so I hear a LOT of on hold music. My favorite was the time someone call Lincoln Center and the hold music is the freakin’ NY Philharmonic. It was a joy!!
A number of years ago I got a call from a friend who asked me to check their on-hold system. I told him it was working. He told me that they were losing a lot of calls. I explained to him that it was a known problem of their type of phone system, which played, in 4:4 time*, a simple loop of a melody originally written in 3:4 time. They would put people on hold, and the people would hang up.
Hate music with voice interruptions. Presume that it’s used by organizations where management thinks that hold time is a more important metric than drop out rate.
*“The Telstra Chimes”