neatorama.com — I know what you’re thinking: What hold music isn’t terrible? When I discovered the voice recorder app on my iPhone, I immediately started recording bad hold music whenever I was forced to wait for a real person to help me.
Apr 12, 2010 View in Crawl 4
ancalagon73Apr 12, 2010
My company just switched to this brand new NEC phone system. Hold music sounds like an old Atari video game. Horrible.
cntlscrutApr 12, 2010
our conference call co. has this horrible badly looped jazz/funk fusion crap that plays that would make even Stanley Clarke cry. make you feel like your in a Belk's back in '83
scuba7183Apr 12, 2010
TECHNO RE-RE-RE-REMIX
cfuseApr 12, 2010
I used to be the telephony administrator of the of a small call centre (about 120 seats). Management always loved to complain but refused to take any responsibility for anything, so they were always willing to bitch and tell you what they didn't like, but they never had a clue what they actually wanted you to do instead. In many cases, they weren't even capable of explaining what was wrong.So, the inevitable complaint about the on hold music came down from the ivory tower (it was literally the royalty free CD that came with the system and had been running for well over a year before it became a "pressing issue"). I decided to cure their indecision with a bunch of promotional techno remixes of the soundtrack of the movie "Signs" (which was out at the time - this is the original and should give you the gist of it: <a class="user" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8czt8R7Z4I" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8czt8R7Z4I</a> ) - it was 2 weeks before they noticed anything (and that was a result of customer complaint. One of the remixes included a line of dialogue from the movie: "There's a monster outside my bedroom, can I have a glass of water?"). I had some of the staff describe the music as scary, tense, and my personal favourite: "It sounds like something (bad) is about to happen" - which if you were familiar with our company is probably an oddly accurate description of our customer service.They told me off about the musical choice in a meeting with the senior managers of the departments. That particular meeting ended with me saying "The on hold music source is a 5 disc cd player. There are 4 of you and 1 of me, you each get a disc, let's go to the music store right now if the music is such a problem for you, and you can all pick whatever you want" (imagine my teeth gritted, my eyes bulging, my hands in a claw like position, and me hissing that all out). Needless to say, none of them did anything (and my musical on hold choices got even weirder).I don't work there any more.
cfuseApr 12, 2010
Oh, I forgot to mention (and it's all coming back to me now) that a lot of on hold music is selected to encourage the caller to hang up. In our case, many of our inbound calls did nothing but cost us money (they weren't sales calls and they were customer service issues that should have been dealt with by training or sales reps) - you should have seen the filthy looks I got when I suggested that having our callers give up and abandon their call before we answered was actually a good thing for us (if a call doesn't make you money it costs you money. I thought that was pretty obvious). I actually remember specifically suggesting horrible on hold music to help achieve that end.
remeloxApr 13, 2010
I've heard #4 before but I can't recall what it is from. Could be on more than one, obviously.