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.
If you're not actively planning content for your on hold program, and, say, play the radio on hold, you're not controlling what you're playing on hold. You're at the whim of a Radio DJ or program manager, who might play music that's unappealing to your callers or who might be producing and playing ads for your competition.

If you use social media to promote your business or have a newsletter, make sure your Client Relations representative and Script Consultant are on the distribution lists, so they can be sure to include any relevant content.
As you begin your search for an on hold messages service provider, you’ll find many companies advertising that they can do the job for you. But, you don’t want just any company, nor do you want the same ho-hum, boring hold-music heard at most businesses, because boring is something your business can’t afford to be. You want a provider that adds real value to your bottom line, you want an on hold company that’s responsive to your needs, has a proven track record, and finally, you want a provider that makes the process easy, so you don’t have to!