
Why is being “on hold” on the telephone not made less annoying? - jordansmithnz
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/113498/why-is-being-on-hold-on-the-telephone-not-made-less-annoying
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Doxin
My "favorite" annoying hold queue was a couple years back when I regularly had
to call the business support line of a big computer manufacturer. It'd go
something like this:

<1 minute of epic flute solo> <sound of phone being picked up> Thank you for
holding. One of our employees will be with you shortly <repeat from the start>

You'd basically get startled into thinking someone had picked up once a
minute. The flute solo got especially grating after the first half hour of
waiting.

On the other hand the ISP I'm currently using has probably the best hold queue
I've ever used. You'll call in, be asked for your postal code at which point
the system tells you if there are any known service disruptions in your area.
Then there's about ~30s of ringing tone after which an actual human picks up
the phone. It's the only big company I know of that has you connected with a
human in <5 minutes.

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Taniwha
I have an Asterisk exchange at home (1 message asking people to choose a digit
for the person they want to speak to cuts 99% of telemarketers)

The thing that annoys me the most about being on hold is that it requires
attention from me that eats into me doing other stuff while I wait .... in
fact if the people who you're calling are too bust to talk to you right now
it's they who should be on hold.

So the thing I keep meaning to implement for my exchange is a feature that
puts a line into a "waiting for hold" state - you do this and put the phone
down - Asterisk keeps saying to the still open line "I still want to talk to
you, please press ' _' when a real person is on the line" ... when they take
you off of hold they press '_', your phone rings you answer and talk to them

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db48x
The best support queue experience I've ever had was with Sonic.net. The first
thing they do is ask if you want someone to call you instead of waiting on the
line. You still have to wait the same amount of time, but you don't have to be
on the phone. You can also go to their website and put in your phone number
and they'll call you.

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Top19
GoDaddy has an option to “mute the music” when you call in thank goodness.
Nothing worse than being on hold for 10 minutes and can’t do anything because
the music destroys any concentration potential you might have.

