Just hold on, I'm comin'
Hold on, I'm comin'
Hold on, I'm comin'
Hold on, I'm comin'
Reach out to me for satisfaction, yeah
Call my name, yeah, for reaction
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah……..Sam and Dave
The world record for being placed on “hold” is believed to be 15 hours, 40 minutes and one second. This was the outcome of a phone call from Australian Andrew Kahn to Qantas Airways according to the Sydney Morning Herald. As a recorded message reassured him, over and over, that a customer service agent would be with him “soon,” he simply stayed on the line. He went on with his life, working, reading, eating, watching TV, sleeping, and, of course, waiting. He told the newspaper, “I wanted to find out what exactly they meant when they said they would be with me as soon as possible.” Kahn was a notable exception as according to data collected from customer surveys, two-thirds of people said they’re only willing to wait on hold for two minutes or less. And 13% said that there’s no amount of time they’d be okay with waiting on hold. A survey by American Texting firm “Talk To” concluded that 86% of consumers say they’re placed on hold every time they call a business. It’s shocking when a human answers but I wouldn’t know because I’m one of the 86%.
“Hold” even has a definition. Techopedia reports that average time spent in this limbo is the average time it takes for an operator to answer a call. It’s the amount of time a customer waits in the electronic dark matter before getting a response from an agent while being assured that “your call is important to us”. Bonus points if you can understand what the agent is saying when you finally reach the Promised Land.
“I don’t see how he can ever finish, if he doesn’t begin.” ……….The Mock Turtle, Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Recently, after returning home to Canadensis from our winter sojourn in Hilton Head, S.C, I was notified that I had a prescription waiting for me back in Hilton Head. Rather than drive back to Hilton Head, I called our local CVS. After giving my date of birth and hearing the robotic “Hello…………John”, and then going through the menu with the recorded computer voice; “do you want to renew a prescription? Press 1 for yes or 2 for no”, “you have a prescription waiting for you”,………”no”, said I, “I would like to speak with a pharmacist”. In response I heard, “For all Covid 19 related questions including test kits press 9”. No, “I would like to speak with a pharmacist”. “Push 2 to speak with a pharmacist”. I pushed 2. “For all Covid 19 related questions including test kits press 9”. Note, if you just say “pharmacist, pharmacist, pharmacist” over and over, you may, eventually, hear, “I can’t understand you, would you like to speak with a pharmacist? Press 1 for yes. I pressed 1. “For all Covid 19 related questions including test kits press 9”. Around three calls and the accompanying Covid 19 Test Kit offers later, and then waiting through a musical presentation interrupted by CVS commercials, I got an actual human pharmacist on the line. She was very helpful and said she would call the Hilton Head CVS to arrange for the prescription transfer. Two days later, having heard nothing, I called CVS again. “Pharmacist, pharmacist, pharmacist” I yelled. “For all Covid 19 related questions including test kits press 9” I was told. I finally go through and the pharmacist, informed me that they had been calling the Hilton Head CVS, but they couldn’t get a live human being on the phone! I’m sure they had lots of information about Covid 19 test kits though. I found the dueling machine calls of the same corporate entity battling it out to be a delicious irony, but it took a week of trying before I could get my prescription transferred up north. I could have gone back to Hilton Head and picked up the prescription and returned home in less time.
In order to be placed “on hold”, you should have a telephone and so we go back to 1876 when Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for what he called “Improvement in Telegraphy". This established the principle of the telephone. He called his first one the “electrical speech machine”. Bell and another inventor, Eisha Gray, had been working independently on the invention. Their rather frantic work pace was so close that they actually got to the patent office on the same day. Bell got there before Gray, he hid behind a door and tripped Gray as he walked in, and then he tied his shoelaces together, and then he switched door signs so that Gray went into the Ladies Bathroom instead of the patent office. Gray, not happy with this turn of events, sued. Bell won……that’s history. That’s also not the whole story. Both Bell and Gray had filed on February 14, but Bell filed a patent application, with the claim that stated “I have invented. “Gray, on the other hand, filed a caveat, a document used at the time to claim “I am working on inventing. “. Priority, in American patent law, follows date of invention, not date of filing. So that, and filing and tripping Gray as he came in the door, helped Bell avoid an even more costly and time-consuming kerfuffle. The U.S. Patent Office issued patent #174,465 to Bell on March 7, 1876. But wait. There’s more. Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci may have beaten them all to it in 1860. Unfortunately, after being injured during an explosion on the Staten Island Ferry, evidently combustible ferries were a problem in those days, his wife sold his prototype telephone and equipment to pay his medical bills. Later, Meucci took his notebooks with all his experiments and a new prototype of telephone to Western Union telegraph company, but their executives (some were friends and colleagues of Bell) failed to meet with him and later claimed to have lost the items he had given them. Two years later Bell filed a patent and set up a company with Western Union.
Once telephone use spread to the general populace, there were too many calls and not enough operators to answer them. Operators at telephone exchanges were overwhelmingly women. They were deemed to be “friendlier” than men. However, this was before the current day, “Steve from Mumbai” at technical support. “How can I help you today Mr. John?”
Milton H. Herzman was working for New York Telephone, an office with, yes, numerous telephones. Although the phones had multiple lines, you had to disconnect each of these lines before a second call could be answered. Oy gevalt! Herzman used his background knowledge in radio, communications, and electronics to come up with a solution to the problem, a working model of the on-hold button. This phenomenon was successfully incorporated into the Western Electric Series E phone, patented in 1930. But there was a more elemental problem with the “silent hold”: There was no way to know if anyone was still actually “on the line.” What goes on while you’re on silent hold? Is the operator sitting there in a recliner chair, puffing on a Marlboro, hair in curlers while wearing a ratty pink bathrobe and sporting fuzzy purple mules waiting for the commercial break on Judge Judy to answer the phone? If your call has been directed to another country for “technical support”, your operator may be out watering the elephants while you’re on hold. The Sounds of Silence and the Silent Hold era lasted for over 30 years
Then we come to 1962, and Alfred Levy of Oyster Bay, NY, filed for a patent for a “telephone hold program system.” Noting that phone services could have more than one incoming call, Levy developed a way to keep one caller occupied while the needs of the other was addressed. Levy, per his patent filing, correctly understood the frustration of the caller whose intended audience was busy with others: “His exasperation many times is heightened by a switchboard operator who, if harassed by a great number of incoming calls, gives short shrift to any caller before transferring the caller to a holding circuit. Such a busy operator frequently will simply acknowledge the call and then immediately say that the desired party or the desired line is busy and that the caller should hold for a moment. Listening to a completely unresponsive instrument is tedious and calls often are abandoned altogether or remade which leads to annoyance and a waste of time and money.” And this was 1962! How did Levy come up with the idea in the first place? Serendipity. Levy owned a factory outside New York City, probably Oyster Bay. Levy’s factory had a problem with its phone service. Apparently, a loose wire was touching a steel girder. The steel acted as an antenna, picking up the signal from a local radio station. The wire tapped into the audio, relaying the station’s broadcast to anyone who was on hold — which Levy only found out when callers informed him of what he thought would be a problem. But to his surprise, callers were pleased by the distraction — they weren’t bothered by the music at all. Levy decided to turn this anomaly into a feature, filed his patent, and all these years later, aren’t we thrilled with muzak versions of Beatles’ songs while waiting to talk to our cable companies? Levy’s Telephone Hold Program System, United States Patent 3246082 would connect the incoming call to a source of program material, e.g. music, thereby to “pacify the originator of the call if the delay becomes unduly long, and also to while away the idle time of the caller who is awaiting connection to a certain party or extension.” Helpfully, he added the hold key which would connect a musical or other program channel to the line. So, Levy’s solution was to add music to the mix. It was a revolutionary idea and Levy was granted his patent in 1966,
“I definitely think hold music has a negative effect on mental health. I argue the main torture results from repetition “– Dean Olsher
Twenty years after his first patent related to this issue, Levy filed a second with fellow inventor Jon D. Paul, of San Francisco, for a technology that allowed callers to decide which hold music they wanted to listen to. Patent number: 4577067 -granted 1986.
Eventually, a rival to music arrived—so-called “messaging on hold.” Why simply play canned music to listeners when you could promote your business or provide people with repeated Covid 19 test kit information and really annoy people? In the mid-1980s, companies began mixing music with messages; companies like American Telephone Tapes (yes, the acronym is ATT) adopted “sultry voice” announcers who would break into the music “every 40 seconds or so.” The stereotypical hold music is an insipid instrumental track, aka musical wallpaper, was pioneered by the Muzak company beginning in the 1930s. It offered instrumental versions of popular songs, albeit recorded by major band leaders of the day. The brand name Muzak became a noun with negative connotations. Ya think? The company went bankrupt in 2009 and was acquired by Mood Media, who ditched the Muzak name forever. The lingering curse of Muzak, like politicians, cockroaches and reality television shows is indestructible.
When your call is placed on hold, the caller is parked, we’ll refer to it as “Hold Purgatory “and you are unable to communicate with the person on the other end of the line and on comes music or a pre-recorded commercial message “hear about our Covid 19 test kit”, for your aural enjoyment.
Today, it is taken as an article of faith by business cognoscenti that “silent hold” is commercial death. You probably cannot remember the last time you had a telephone wait unaccompanied by something. Calls to Apple result in choice of music or silence, I always choose silence and put the phone on speaker, volume up, next to my desktop and type away. After 15 minutes, usually forgetting I’m on hold, someone comes on the line at maximum volume scaring the daylights out of me.
“Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line until your call is no longer important to you” …….Mike Baldwin
The Bizzarro world of on hold music and messaging even has its own award. The MARCE Awards (formerly known as The Holdies and which stands for MARketing & Creative Excellence) is an annual competition held by the Experience Marketing Association. Winners have included Best Branding/Best of Show by Italian Street Kitchen, an Australian restaurant chain, which features a folky accordion track, ambient street noise, and an Italian-accented voiceover telling the caller “we will be with you presto.” And Pit Stop Portables’ ‘” The Adventures of Peyton Pitstop and his team of clean-cut superheroes”. We believe the award ceremony is held electronically with attendees calling in to see if they won and being placed on hold while listening to Lawrence Welk’s “Beer Barrel Polka” on a continuous loop.
As for the latest innovation, that of having them call you back? For some reason, we cannot imagine why, customers do not trust the company or entity to call them back. There has even been an academic study of this. Seyed Emadi and Vinayak Deshpande, operations professors at UNC used data from a U.S.-based bank’s call center to produce an empirical study of caller behavior with a callback option. “I was thinking callbacks would be extremely popular; that’s not the case,” says Emadi. “Even though the discomfort waiting offline is much less than being tethered to the phone. That was really surprising.”
Despite an avalanche of technological breakthroughs, the technique and format of on-hold programs has not changed much since the 1980s. The basic idea is to keep callers calm, entertained, and interested, thus preventing them from hanging up. Yup, that sure works well.
As the old joke goes, I was on hold with the IRS when an automated voice said, "Please don't hang up. Your call is important to us."
No one calls customer service to chat. In most cases, people call to report a problem or request assistance—it’s time taken out of a busy day. It’s minutes out of your life that you will not get back. Not surprisingly, sometimes callers are already in a bad mood, then the caller experience makes things worse. When you call most customer service centers it becomes clear that businesses still have a lot to learn about providing a positive holding experience – positive holding experience, is that an oxymoron? - for their callers because it’s still an endurance test of patience, fortitude and frequently, technological expertise.
Don't hang up (no no)
Oh don't you do it now, don’t hang up (No No)
Don't hang up like you always do…….The Orlons
A favorite experience involves waiting, at length, on hold and finding that the department and human you finally get through to is THE WRONG DEPARTMENT. “Let me transfer your call to sales” says the perky operator. Just as you’re yelling “no, but!”, there are several clicks and then beep beep beep beep. Yes, it’s the dreaded beeps of the disconnected call, you stare in futility at the now useless phone in your hand. You:
A. Sigh deeply and start over again.
B. Curse sincerely (choice of words and volume is optional)
C. Hurl the phone at something.
D. Get on with your life and try again later.
E. All of the above
One is reminded of Sisyphus, that Greek king condemned by the gods to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom every time he reaches the top. The Existentialist author/philosopher, Albert Camus proposed that an eternity of futile labor is a terrible punishment. And this was before telephone holds.
It may be time to rethink the whole hold strategy as they’re currently experiencing “unusually high call volumes”, just like every other time we’ve called.
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” ………. Estragon, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.
