Andy Richardson: On-hold playlist could help ease frustration of callers

I was placed on hold. It may have been Angels by Robbie Williams – it may not have been. The caveat, of course, is in case someone from the bank’s on-hold music department displays more efficiency than the rest of the bank’s team displays and checks the call to find I’m in error.

So it may or may not have been something by the one-time Take That fella.

I can’t remember.

What I can remember is the nausea after listening to the same damn song, sounding as tinny as though it were being played through a 1973 transistor radio, after 35 flipping minutes.

Thirty-five minutes was just the start of it, of course, and during a frustrating four-hour sequence of calls to fix an error that a helpful man had made in the security department, I became so bored that I emailed the Chief Exec, twice, to wish him a more pleasant day than I was having and to suggest he bank with an organisation slightly less inefficient.

He wrote back, bless him, or, rather, one of his team did. If only they’d have been as efficient in fixing the account they broke they wouldn’t have had to.

But I digress, and what I really wanted to write about was the inane, discombobulatingly bad musak that banks, shops and utility companies play, rather than the ineptitude of any particular bank.

They are pretty much as bad as each other, in my experience.

On another occasion, I tried to open a new business account. I’d got two with the bank in question, but they rejected me on lord knows what grounds even though everything was in order.

The guy who’d processed the application didn’t understand an element of the application and rather than check it so that he did, he offered a cursory ‘no’ and moved on to spoil another poor sap’s day. Which might explain why he has a dull, poorly paid desk job rather than something more interesting or more well paid.

So, where were we? Hold music.

A friend, who goes by the appropriate and deliciously clever nom de plume Churlish Noggin took to Twitter to vent his frustration.

“When will there be a choice for holding music? It would change the whole experience. I’m going slowly insane to the hideous R&B offered as I write these words. Oh for a menu with a bit of wordless reggae, jazz or classical.”

Indeed, how difficult can that be in an age of – as Nadine Dorres puts it – downstreaming movies? Simple answer, it isn’t. Set up a voice command and don’t grind your callers into submission by playing music they hate while they wait an insanely long period of time for someone to pick up the damn phone.

It wasn’t always this way, was it?

Time was when there weren’t ladder commands – press 1 for this and 2 for that – and you’d actually got the opportunity to speak to a real person who a) might give a damn, b) might be empowered to fix things, or, c) might not make the issue worse.

Online retail can be the worst, in my experience. A certain company that delivers things super quickly and employs nearly 1.3 million people worldwide, none of whom are able to take a phone call from a customer – that’s if you can find a phone number to call them on.

Still, they’re not as bad as one mailing company who lost a super expensive briefcase intended as a Christmas gift after delivering to a local shop and then collecting it from the same local shop an hour later – I know, that should have been my job, as the customer – before burying it in a warehouse forever.

Rant over. Change the music, guys, or, better still: answer the phone.