I don’t mind hold music. Having recently purchased health insurance, transferred my driver’s license, and attempted to fix a printer, I have heard quite a lot of it lately. I even have some favorite tunes.
The trouble is that hold music is slowly being corrupted by a greedy, customer-hating force: Those stupid little spoken messages. The music stops, and some possibly robotic person starts asking if I have tried checking the support website (Why else would I be on hold?) or, worse yet, whether I have heard about the rest of the company’s exciting products, presumably so that I may wait on hold, one day, for help fixing them too.
Each spoken intrusion shatters the muzak. It shatters the personal muzak of my zen. “There is someone in my phone!” I think. “Are they here to help me? Do they need help?” No. They are not real.
See, hold music was perfect before. It said, “We’re sorry your stuff is broken and you have to wait, but at least you can jam on this.”It mildly amused and, more importantly, it let you know you were still waiting. Maybe you might even hear some Bill Withers.
This is what hold music should be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g4dkBF5anU
But now those two hours are torture, because a voice is preparing at any minute to jump out of my telephone to scare me. And for what? Ostensibly, it’s a chance for companies to deliver valuable information. More often, it’s a way for a business to capitalize on my time. These messages are like television advertising, except they’re not wedged between chunks of something all that enjoyable. They’re wedged between hold music, and hold music doesn’t have all that much going for it to begin with.
If I’m on hold, I’m already mildly annoyed. Interrupting messages bring out true, impotent rage. (Hang on – customer support actually just picked up.)
Back to it. (My printer is fixed.) I will concede there is some use to messages on hold lines. They genuinely might show the customer an alternate solution, or provide other useful information. But even then, I think messages should be limited to the first few minutes of a call. I don’t want to be interrupted by some overly extroverted robot; I definitely don’t want to hear the same messages twice; and I most certainly don’t want to be an advertising target when I’m sitting on hold.
Addendum: I just realized this is one big argument for call-back services. It seems simple enough to just call the customer back when someone is available. I suspect some companies don’t want to give up their new advertising space.