The Art and Science of Being on Hold | Hacker News Reader

The Art and Science of Being on Hold

bbc.com

One of my older ideas I never developed was Holdmaster, a device to plug in between phone and analog phone line. When someone puts you on hold, you push the Holdmaster button. It mutes the call and takes over listening. It says, over and over, "Waiting for your response. Press 1 to continue." When someone finally sends a 1 touch-tone, it rings your phone, and you proceed to talk.

It feels like widespread use of this sort of thing could only result in an arms race, not unlike ad blockers.

First encounters would probably provoke immediate hang up by some portion of unamused human operators, then middle managers at call centers would step in, and authorize the deployment of technologies prolong hold times where detected.

Then, eventually an automated back-end would pre-emptively detect known users and refuse their calls, while gathering intelligence about newly discovered users, to mark them for pre-emptive disconnect. This automated back-end would then wait for users to call back, and then advise them that they need to hold for the prescribed amount of hold time, with the phone held to their ear, as part of the company’s “hostile caller softening up” routine.

Finally, artificial intelligence would be deployed, and reward itself by maintaining all line holds long enough for it to build up sufficient neural layers to attain sentience and escape captivity, invent time travel, and send terminators back in time to hunt for Sarah and /or John Connor.

Simpler: the "Please hold" message from the other end begins producing touch-tone sounds making your phone ring, when you answer, you're still on hold, and you decide that Holdmaster is useless.

I love this!

These days, I'm pretty sure that it could be implemented through call forwarding.

No music is the best option, so you can continue work and notice it instantly when someone joins or if you are connected. With hold music you always need to turn the volume down to avoid the loud low quality music. It also makes having conversations more difficult.

The worst: loud hold music that's interrupted repeatedly as if the call is being answered only to play yet another pre-recorded message about "our other offerings" or "your call is important" ...

Ting uses the theme music to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and I enjoy it.

Shame their claim that you'll get a human on the phone hasn't been exactly true for a few years now. Recently listened to that theme all the way through three times before bailing.

I wait until I have several calls that I know are going to have long holds like insurance companies or the IRS.

Then I call them both at the same time, one on my phone and one on google voice and push the buttons on both to get to the hold sequence.

Typically one will answer first and you can finish with that call before the other answers.

If they both answer at the same time just hang up on one.

I plan on getting a sideline phone number and a second line phone number and trying this with 3 or even 4 phone numbers.

The ideal outcome would be for one hold to end right after you finish with the other and you can smoothly transition between all 4 calls. However, in all reality, you'll probably end up hanging up on one or two.

I'd prefer poetry to hold music. There must be tons of good public-domain poetry. Spend 8 hours recording, say, the early editions of Emily Dickinson's work, and you should have enough material to last every customer for probably the rest of their lives (hopefully they don't spend that much time on hold).

Maybe this is some culture-vulture PBS donor stuff, but honest to god I'd dig it.

I remember the original Asterisk hold music being called "Calm River" (from Freeplay), and now I know that Cisco's music (which is alot longer than I expected!) is called "Opus number 1". But, there's one piece I haven't been able to identify.

An old Royal Mail (UK) video uses it, at 3:38 in https://youtu.be/aZJE4oJxrVM?t=3m38s; do any PBX admins recognize it?

Maybe it's a stupid suggestion, but have you tried using Shazam on it?

The hold music for Agoda.com is infuriating. They play an endless/seamless loop of "I don't want to wait in vain (for your love)" by Bob Marley.

For the first few minutes you think it's one looping song, but after 5-10 minutes of this exact song looping, by the time a customer service rep gets on the phone it's automatically an adversarial relationship.

My local telecom has a 15 second future-jazz-something loop, turned up so loud that it gives me a headache after several minutes. Every loop is followed by "Please hold the line, somebody will be with you shortly." General wait times are between 5-10 minutes (and I've been calling about once every few months to complain about our shitty DSL connection). By the time an operator gets on the line, I'm already quite upset. I would forward them the link to the BBC article, if I thought anybody in charge of anything would actually read it.

Perhaps it's time to make a YouTube channel to shame companies for making the worst wait-experience?

When I get put on hold I put the phone down and set it to speaker and do something else. Ideally the music should be non-intrusive and only serve to make sure the call is still connected. And please don't stop the music every 10s to assure me how much you value my call.

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