USA Business Telephone Today conducted a survey of 30,000 callers to study the effects of hold music, or the lack of it, for a single minute. More than half the callers who were put on hold without any auditory stimulation hung up. The silence affected the rest of the group’s perception of time: More than 27 percent thought their wait time exceeded five minutes, and 18 percent thought it exceeded three minutes. Only 3 percent judged their wait time to be close to the actual one-minute timeframe. All of the callers in the study had listened to dead air for only 60 seconds.
This brings up the ever-present question of appropriate branding for your business. At a funeral home, Green says, you don't want an upbeat pop song, for obvious reasons. Mark Malekpour, who works at Beatsuite, a music library which sells a variety of songs specifically for hold systems, says that companies too often want popular music. "For an insurance company, you don't want something from Queen or U2," he said. "When you're choosing music for an insurance company, it shouldn't feel happy or feel good or lighthearted, because insurance is something you have to have, and you want to think, 'These guys get what insurance is all about.' " (Beatsuite's bestselling hold song is called "Inspiring Innovation," which is tagged as: "Success, achievement, and trustworthy.")

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