I was hanging on the phone for BT the other day, feeling my life slowly ebbing away, my hair thinning, the wrinkles on my face growing deeper, when I had a thought. I wonder how much of my life I spend on hold listening to recorded messages? My favourite one is, “Your call is important to us…” If it matters so much, why doesn’t someone answer it?
It turns out I’m not the first person to consider this. A couple of years ago someone in the US did a study and found that the average person spends 43 days of their life on hold.
That breaks down to between 10 to 20 minutes a week. Not a long time on the face of it but it all adds up.
Having said that, this is only an average…
Australian Andrew Khan called Quantas airline to confirm a flight in July 2012. He claims to have waited 15 hours, 40 minutes and one second before hanging up. “I had had enough,” he said. It must have been that one second that broke the camel’s back. Airlines are reputed to be particularly bad for making customers hang on with four in the top 10 of one long-wait list.
This waste of time is alarming. Though equally troubling is the fact that most of us will spend 653 hours of our lives waiting for trains, five months complaining and six months queuing. Not to mention 11 years on the sofa watching TV (in my case usually football, so it’s not entirely wasted).
Imagine all the things you could do if you put those 43 lost days to better use. You could:
- Swim the Channel 147 times
- Read War and Peace 31 times
- Cycle across the USA and back – twice
- Watch 688 games of football (not including half time)
It doesn’t have to be like this. Live chat, text and WhatApp messages are becoming increasingly popular ways of contacting customer service departments. If you feel your business could improve its customer experience, Opus has several services that can help you.
Please contact us by calling 0800 316 7566 for more information.
