Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

You dial the number. You listen to the cheerful recording telling you how much they value your call. Then comes the music—that infuriating, tinny loop that plays on repeat while you're stuck in a digital purgatory. Twenty minutes pass. Thirty. An hour. Your call is "very important to us," the automated voice reassures you every ninety seconds, yet somehow you're still number seven in the queue.

This isn't just an inconvenience anymore. It's become a systemic abuse of customer time, and nobody seems to be talking about how deliberately cruel these systems have become.

The Numbers Behind the Nightmare

Let's start with the data, because it's genuinely shocking. According to a 2023 customer service study, the average hold time for major corporations has increased by 34% over the past five years. Credit card companies lead the pack with an average hold time of 28 minutes. Health insurance providers aren't far behind at 24 minutes. Even supposedly "customer-friendly" tech companies are keeping people on hold for 15-20 minutes on average.

What makes this particularly infuriating is that we're not talking about rare situations where heavy call volume is understandable. These wait times happen consistently, day after day, across all hours of operation. A woman I know named Sarah called her bank on a Tuesday morning at 9:47 AM—right after business hours opened—and was told her wait time would be 42 minutes. Forty-two minutes at the start of the business day.

The math is ugly. If you make just three customer service calls a year and average 20-minute hold times, you've lost an entire hour of your life. Most people make significantly more calls than that. Multiply that across hundreds of millions of customers, and we're talking about billions of collective human hours wasted annually. That's not a glitch in the system. That's the system working exactly as designed.

Why Companies Love Torturing You on Hold

Here's the uncomfortable truth: these long hold times aren't accidental. They're strategic.

Companies have crunched the numbers, and they've determined that it's cheaper to make you wait than to hire enough customer service representatives. A full-time customer service representative costs a company somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000 annually in salary and benefits. If they can handle 100 customer calls per week, that's roughly $6-10 per call in labor costs. But if they understaff their department and force customers to wait longer, that same rep might only handle 60-70 meaningful calls per week because people give up and hang up. The company saves money while simultaneously filtering out the customers who are "least profitable."

It's a version of economic triage. The company is betting that the customers frustrated enough to hang up after 20 minutes probably weren't going to be high-value clients anyway. The people who wait 40 minutes? They're usually the ones with real problems that matter—billing disputes, account issues, things that generate repeat business or show up as complaints if left unresolved.

Some companies have gotten even more sophisticated. They'll tell you a wait time that's significantly longer than the actual wait, so when you finally connect after 18 minutes instead of 45, you're so relieved that you're less likely to complain about the service quality itself. It's psychological manipulation dressed up as "customer service."

The Fake Solutions That Don't Actually Solve Anything

Companies know you hate hold times. They've done focus groups. They understand that endless waiting is a primary driver of customer dissatisfaction. So what do they do? They offer solutions that sound good but don't actually address the problem.

"Call us back and we'll call you when it's your turn!" sounds wonderful until you realize that feature works maybe 40% of the time, and when they do call back, it's usually during a window you specified three days ago that no longer fits your schedule. Or they'll introduce a chatbot that can't solve 80% of common problems, forcing you to request human contact anyway. I spent 23 minutes chatting with a bot about my phone bill dispute, only to be told that a representative would need to take over—and then I waited another 31 minutes for that human to pick up.

The worst part? These fake solutions actually cost money to develop and implement. Money that could have gone toward hiring more actual customer service staff. But investing in robots and callback systems looks better to shareholders than simply admitting you're understaffed because you want to maximize profit margins.

When Hold Times Become Actually Dangerous

This all becomes more than just irritating when you're trying to reach someone about a serious problem. Healthcare issues particularly fall into this trap. A person dealing with an insurance claim denial might need answers urgently. An elderly person trying to sort out a billing error can't necessarily afford to spend two hours on the phone in chunks throughout their day. And don't even get me started on people trying to reach their bank's fraud department—you're already stressed about unauthorized charges on your account, and now you're spending 35 minutes waiting to talk to someone who can help.

I spoke with Michael, who was trying to reach his mortgage company about a payment error. He called on three separate days, waited 30+ minutes each time, and only got through once. That conversation lasted 12 minutes and didn't resolve his issue. By the time he finally connected with someone who could actually help—on his fifth attempt—he'd spent nearly three hours on hold dealing with a problem that took 8 minutes to fix. The company had effectively added a 192-minute overhead cost to an 8-minute solution.

What Actually Needs to Happen

The solution isn't complicated, which is exactly why it won't happen without pressure. Companies need to staff their customer service departments adequately. Not optimally. Not lavishly. Just adequately. Average hold times of less than five minutes are absolutely achievable. Some smaller companies and a handful of larger ones already do this, and they're not going bankrupt.

It requires companies to accept slightly lower profit margins in exchange for customer satisfaction that actually translates to loyalty. It requires acknowledging that customer service is a cost of doing business, not a loss leader to be minimized into oblivion. It requires treating customer time as having actual value.

Until enough customers either complain vocally, switch to competitors with better service, or governments actually regulate acceptable hold time limits, nothing will change. Companies will continue calculating that the cost-benefit analysis favors making you suffer.

The next time you're stuck on hold listening to that infuriating music loop, remember: this isn't happening to you by accident. It's a deliberate choice made by someone in a corporate office who decided your time was worth less than their quarterly earnings report.

By the way, if you think long hold times are bad, you should read about how shipping companies have made package theft an accepted part of the delivery process. Same corporate playbook, different industry.