One Ringy Dingy
When did I agree to spend my life on "hold"?
“All of our specialists are currently assisting other customers. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”
A large part of moving house is sitting on the phone for much of a day while one company after another tries to convince you that they really, truly care about you, and that the fifteen or twenty minute delay in answering your call is a truly unusual circumstance and not Standard Operating Procedure.
More and more I find myself saying “Enough!” and hanging up. If your company isn’t willing to treat customers with respect, and with some modicum of decent service, then you will no longer get my hard-earned cash.
Let’s be blunt: when you’re shuffled off into the land of perpetual “hold” you’re being treated badly, and it’s because of choices made by the company you’re calling.
They could easily solve this problem by just hiring more employees.
When we moved Nova Scotia I was really happy to move my banking from HSBC - one of the worst offenders - to the LaHave River Credit Union. The thing that I really loved about the credit union was that I could phone the actual branch, have the phone answered by someone in the building, and have problems solved quickly and easily.
Sadly the LaHave Credit Union has merged with the East Coast Credit Union and, despite explicit promises to the contrary, phones now get answered by some random person in some random location.
This makes me very sad.
So I’m making a call to action: say no. If a company can’t even manage to answer their phones, or hides critical information that you need, or just treats you like garbage, stop doing business with them.
If you sense that their time is more important than your time, you should move on.
To be honest, sometimes you’ll need to pay a little more, but if you factor in your time, your level of frustration and irritation, and of course the monthly or annual subscription charge, you can usually conclude that a change is a bargain.
Look local, and look small. Easy though Amazon.com may be, they’re in many ways a really nasty company. Find a local bookstore and develop a relationship with them. They won’t give you free next day delivery (because our government refuses to force Canada Post to match Amazon’s service) but they’ll truly appreciate your purchase.
And you’ll meet some genuinely nice people, and buy some books that you never would have expected.
The same applies to groceries, and linens, and all manner of day to day services.
Believe it or not, there really are alternatives to most mega-shopping giants. And once you’re used to them you’ll find that they offer services that you might never have imagined. Even better, sooner or later, they’ll rescue you in a crisis.
It will be a very long time before Google or Amazon does that.
And music on hold? NPR has a great little article about it right here.
An industry legend is that Alfred Levy, a factory owner, discovered the potential of hold music accidentally when an exposed wire in his telephone system was picking up the broadcast of a radio next door. Levy submitted a patent in 1966 for a "Telephone Hold Program System," which described the psychological frustrations of being on hold in prim detail. "Courteous telephone practice requires that a held caller be assured at reasonable intervals that the party to whom he wishes to speak still is busy but the pressure of her duties may prevent the operator from so advising the incoming caller so that he may be bereft of even this small consolation."