Hold Music

INTERNAL — Facilities & Customer Experience
Subject: Hold music (again)

1.

The current hold music has been in place since the telephony migration in 2014.

It is a forty-one second loop. It has no title. It came bundled with the switch and appears in the vendor documentation only as hold_04.wav.

2.

Average hold time across the contact centre is four minutes eleven seconds.

That is six loops.

3.

I have raised this in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023.

4.

I wish to restate, because it is raised every time, that I am not proposing silence. Silence on hold is worse; the data on this is unambiguous and callers hang up assuming they have been cut off.

I am proposing a different piece of music.

5.

The objections received to date, in order of frequency:

5.1 Licensing. Addressed in my 2019 paper. The vendor library contains four hundred and ten cleared tracks. We are using one of them and have been for eleven years.

5.2 Cost. There is no cost. It is a dropdown.

5.3 Callers do not notice. Addressed at length below.

5.4 We have bigger priorities. Agreed. This has been agreed since 2017.

6. On whether callers notice

They notice.

I have kept a log of verbatim comments in which a caller mentions the hold music unprompted. The log begins in March 2018.

There are four hundred and sixty-one entries.

A representative sample:

– "Is that the same eight seconds over and over?"
– "I've been listening to this since Tuesday." (Caller had been holding for nine minutes.)
– "There's a bit at the end where it doesn't quite join up."
– "Do you have to listen to this?" (Yes.)
– "I've started dreaming about it."

7. On the bit at the end where it doesn't quite join up

This is correct and is, in my view, the crux of the matter.

The loop point is not clean. There is a synthesised string figure that resolves onto the first beat, but the reverb tail from the previous pass is cut, producing an audible discontinuity of roughly eighty milliseconds.

Once you have heard it you cannot stop hearing it.

Nine of my team have independently identified it without prompting. One of them, who has worked here since 2015, refers to it as "the gulp."

8.

I would like to note for the record that in 2021 a caller sang the loop to me.

Correctly. All forty-one seconds. Including the gulp.

He said he had been holding for the DVLA earlier and had experienced "a moment of recognition." He was not angry. He said it was, and I am quoting from the log, "nice to talk to someone who understands."

We spoke for six minutes. I am aware this exceeded target handling time.

9. Proposal

That hold_04.wav be replaced with any other file in the vendor library.

I have listened to all four hundred and ten. Fourteen are suitable. I have ranked them. The ranking is attached as Appendix B and represents approximately eleven hours of my own time, which I have not claimed.

10.

I am aware that this is the fifth time.

I am aware of how it looks.

I would ask the committee to consider that I have now heard this forty-one seconds, on a conservative estimate, one hundred and ninety thousand times, and that I remain — as of this writing — professional, productive, and entirely willing to continue.

11.

But I would like it changed.

Yours,
D. Ferreira
Team Leader, Contact Centre

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RESPONSE — Facilities

Thanks Daniela. Noted. Adding to the agenda for the Q3 review.

Can you send Appendix B again? I don't think the attachment came through.