You call into a business. While you wait to get to the right person, you listen to music, information about the company and its promotions, or maybe even a recording that reminds you that your call is important to them.
On hold messages can be recorded for many purposes, such as promoting your business, answering FAQs or announcing important customer service information. It's important to be clear in the message you are trying to get across. Confusion leads to disengagement and reflects badly on the brand. Determining your callers' wait times is necessary to determine the required length of the on-hold message. Making the recording too short can lead to the message being played too many times. This can be repetitive and lose the caller's attention while they hold.

Easy On Hold Founder Tim Brown says that the new scheduling mechanism is what makes the Easy On Hold streaming message unique. "The traditional four-minute on-hold loop, where several paragraphs are edited over one piece of music, is an outdated approach," he says. "Our service puts together a library of individual spots that can be told when to play and how often. You can schedule start and stop dates, too, so old content is never heard."
It's a panoptic experience, being on hold while listening to someone singing about being on hold. Depending how long it takes for someone else to join the call, you could be listening for awhile. The music builds as time goes on, culminating in a spoken verse that begins: "Well, let me tell you all a story / about a man who was on hold all day..." This unusually self-aware song is the default music for a conference call service called UberConference, where "I'm On Hold" plays on a loop for anyone who calls in early, on almost every call that doesn't start exactly when it's scheduled to (or doesn't ever start at all). It's selected by nine out of ten call organizers, and plays over a million times per month, says Craig Walker, CEO of Dialpad, owner of UberConference.