They are one of the irritations of modern life - prerecorded messages
that tell us to press a button in order to join a queue to speak to a
real person. But who are the people behind the disembodied voices?
Jon Ronson meets them
Monday March 27, 2006
The Guardian
In a recording studio in a gated business park in Chiswick, west
London, Holly Baldwin is offering direction to actor Martine Brown,
who is in a soundproofed booth, listening to Baldwin through
headphones. "OK," says Holly. "Think real person; confident, open,
honest, informal, down to earth, approachable, believable, not
stuffy, warm, soothing, inviting tone of voice. Play with your
regional accent. You're a person, not a machine - it's you, Martine
Brown, a person, which is why we want a regional accent."
"OK," says Martine.
"Are you ready?" says Holly. "Go!"
"'To talk about a payment or anything to do with your bill, press
1'," says Martine.
"I'm loving it, loving it," says Holly. "OK. Let's move on to
Announcement 2. I'm looking for warm, upbeat, non-accusatory. We are
not trying to imply the caller has done something wrong. We are not
accusing them of making some kind of cock-up. OK? Remember not to
patronise. Are you recording?"
"Yes," says Tony the sound engineer.
"Go!" says Molly to Martine.
"'Oh! You've entered a phone number that we don't recognise. Have
another go'," says Martine.
"Brilliant," says Holly. "Can you do it again?"
Holly explains that the message she hopes to convey by getting the
inflection of the "Oh!" exactly right, is: "I'm sorry, I know this is
a pain for you. It really might have been our fault that we didn't
recognise your phone number. Just try and enter it again, OK?"
"I know it's a lot to convey in an 'Oh!'," Holly admits to Martine
apologetically after they have tried it half a dozen ways.
"Maybe I should actually say some of that, rather than try to convey
it all in an inflection," suggests Martine in the soundbooth.
"No," says Holly. "Remember, these people are on hold. The fewer
words the better."
Holly is the Stanley Kubrick of the on-hold experience, and not just
the holding on part. Her mini-dramas deal not only with the classic
"your call will be answered shortly" stuff, but also with what are
known as IVR (interactive voice response) menus - press 1 for this,
press 2 for that. In the on-hold world, these two aspects of holding
are nowadays considered one and the same.
Holly works for SOH (a company formally known as Success on Hold).
During today's voice session, the adjective she uses most frequently
to direct Martine is "soothing". The aim is to provide a "soothing"
experience for callers who, it must be assumed, "are in a fragile
state of mind, anxious and irritated" because they have been put on
hold. These callers are liable to feel "patronised, aggravated, or
inflamed" if Martine's inflection is even slightly off, Holly says.
SOH keeps callers soothed on behalf of a client list that includes
Abbey, Direct Line Insurance, GlaxoSmithKline, Microsoft, Morgan
Stanley, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Tesco Personal Finance and
Unilever. Today's session is for NTL broadband.
SOH is an unusually thoughtful provider of the on-hold experience.In
fact, when I began to research this world I did not imagine such a
company existed. But hanging on a telephone is taking up more and
more of our time: according to David Boyle's book The Tyranny of
Numbers, the average person now spends 45 hours a year on hold on the
end of a telephone.
Twenty-eight per cent of people who were polled by Apropos in 2003
said that being left on hold has resulted in physical side effects
such as headaches and raised heart rates. A survey by Mintel in 2002
found that 90% of callers are "fed up" holding, 60% are "frustrated",
and 30%, when faced with an interminable wait, will actually start
frantically and irrationally pressing any button before slamming the
phone down. Some have now taken to fighting back: a number of "cheat
sheets" have popped up on the internet and in newspapers, with tips
on how to bypass the system when calling a particular supplier and
get straight through to an agent.
It was driving me nuts. Who, I began to wonder, were the people
behind these shrill, muttering recorded voices? What did they look
like? They didn't really sound sorry that they were keeping me on
hold, I would think. I bet they aren't doing all they can to connect
me to a representative. And so I began my journey to find out.
It turns out that most big companies still get someone from the
office to do the voice. You can tell. In fact, if you listen closely,
you can often hear the background noises, evidence that someone has
just gone up to someone with a tape recorder and said, "Talk into
this."
You will see what I mean if you phone Sainsbury's Bank on 0500
405060. Don't press anything at all. Just stay on the line. The first
thing you will hear is a muffled woman offering you various options,
in a recording hovering just on the edge of intelligibility. What the
hell do you get if you press 5? "Childish puns"? Anyway, don't press
anything. What happens then is that a different voice pops up, less
muffled this time, but saying exactly the same thing, with one weird
exception: now if you press 5, it says, you won't get childish puns.
You get mortgages. Then there's a ringing tone, which offers you
false hope, because immediately a third voice pops up, just to
introduce a fourth voice, who sounds like the Queen, and says
something about sort codes, at which point I hung up. It is a
horrible 55 seconds.
For what might be the world's very worst on-hold experience, though,
you will need to dial the US: Continental Airlines' Info-Pass service
on 001 713 785 8999. (It seems to only work in the afternoons UK
time). You know you are in for a long menu when, from the beginning,
you are required not to press 1 but 11. And so it transpires. Moments
to look out for include the unexpected cameo of the sour-voiced woman
who pops up apropos of nothing, quite early on, to mutter something
about your current year elite mileage balance. Then there is the
mystery of the missing options 19 to 30. Why does it go from option
18 straight to the particularly nightmarish option 31: "For
instructions on how to receive credit for missing mileage, how to
redeposit a one pass reward to your account, or how to combine your
duplicate accounts"? And the biggest mystery of all: why, when it
gets to the option of pressing 33 for information about reward
travel, have they brought in a whole new person just to say the word
"press"?
After all that, you think, "I need a holiday, but I'm not going
Continental. I know! I'll phone United Airlines on 0845 8444 777, and
book a flight somewhere wonderful!" So you do. What follows is the
longest and least sun-kissed 43 seconds of your life: "Please note
that security regulations may require us to provide government
agencies access to any data you disclose to us ... Due to new health
and safety regulations please be advised that any baggage weighing
over 32 kilos will no longer be accepted at check in ... " And on and
on. Suddenly the beach feels a very long way away.
Or you could call Revenue and Customs on 0845 366 7840, for an
example of especially loud background noises, practically drowning
out a woman who sounds like she wants to kill herself. On the other
end of the happiness scale is the Britannic woman on 0845 305 5552,
who sounds a little uncontrollably joyous if you ask me.
The photographer Stephen Gill has collected on his website
(stephengill.co.uk) various traditional recordings he has made of
being on hold: dull, shrill voices muttering, "Your call is important
to us." "Please continue to hold for a representative." "All calls
may be recorded for future training purposes." And then a horrific
burst of: "You're simply the best! Better than all the rest!"
It is depressing. The experience triggered in me some deep misery.
And then I sampled the nadir of Gill's collection: the Bristol
revenue services department. It was a woman's recorded voice, quite
flat and brisk: "Welcome to the revenue services department." A
silence of just less than three seconds followed, and then: "If you
wish to pay your invoice by debit card, and you know your invoice
number, please press 1 . . ."
Those 2.8 seconds of silence were the most disturbing thing. It took
me back to all the little unexplained silences that have popped up,
over the years, while I have been on hold; 2.8 seconds does not give
one's brain enough time to consciously ask, is the silence
deliberate? If so, why would they do that? Or is it a mistake? Has
something gone wrong with the on-hold machine? Or is it
thoughtlessness? If so, what does that say about the company I am
holding for? Instead, it prompts a vaguely confused, sinking feeling,
like a child would feel if its parents unexpectedly did something
slightly sadistic for no good reason.
Then there is the music. Greensleeves is especially annoying, though
ever since a 2003 NOP poll voted Greensleeves the most "enraging" on-
hold music (followed by Nessun Dorma, and Tina Turner's Simply the
Best) the tune has become less ubiquitous. But my guess is that poll
respondents were not railing against Greensleeves per se. What
irritated them was how the same tunes would pop up no matter which
company we were calling, as if the corporate world was uniting to
say: "We collectively don't care about your state of mind while we
waste your life putting you on hold."
What you have instead of predictable tunes, these days, are adverts.
As the trade magazine Connect recently advocated: "On-hold can
provide a number of business benefits, including selling. You have
the caller's undivided attention, so capitalise on it. Use hold time
to advertise product lines and services." Credit card companies, such
as MBNA on 0800 062062, are quick to offer you three free credit
cards - "extra security for all of your family" - while you are
trapped, holding for them.
And yet it seems the thing we find most aggravating of all is
silence. In 1999, a Leicester University psychologist, Adrian North,
tested 100 volunteers, concluding that we are 20% more likely to keep
holding if panpipe versions of Beatles songs are played instead of
silence, even if we hate panpipe music. Reebok customer services
offer a particularly horrific mix of silence and background noise
when they put you on hold, but I won't give you its number. Unlike
the numbers I reproduce here, sometimes a real person answers, and I
would not want many thousands of Guardian readers phoning up, getting
a real person, panicking, hanging up and freaking that real person
out.
I have sometimes wondered, while being trapped on hold: does nobody
from the corporate world realise how alienating this is? I asked
various call centres, and their answer was yes, one company realises
it: SOH.
Fran Fish is the managing director of SOH. "I used to work in call
centres," she says, "but my hobby has always been people watching -
trying to work out what makes people behave in a certain way. It's
like an addiction. I'm on a train and a couple sit opposite me. He's
pissed. She's not. He's scruffy. She's posh. I get obsessed."
Recently, a big, household-name insurance company discovered that a
large number of its callers were mysteriously hanging up 46 seconds
after being put on hold. They could not understand it. Up and down
the country, customers were unexpectedly slamming their phones down,
as if in a panic, after 46 seconds of holding. So the company called
in Fish to solve the mystery.
We are sitting in the meeting room of Fish's west-London
headquarters. She rifles around, finds the perplexing recording, and
puts it into the machine.
"Have a listen," she says, "and try to spot why so many people hung
up at 46 seconds."
She presses play. A woman who sounds like the Queen asks us to hold
for a representative. Then she tells us that we will shortly be
connected to a representative. Then it all goes eerily silent. And
then, 46 seconds in, a new and even shriller voice suddenly pops up
from nowhere and practically yells: "We exchange information with
other insurers and the police through various databases. Please
answer all questions as accurately as possible ... "
This is the moment lots of callers slammed their phones down. And
presumably started looking anxiously around their living rooms,
feeling scared.
Now, Fish plays me the new tape, the one SOH concocted. Nowadays,
phoning this insurance company is like meeting a lovely woman at a
party. "How can we help?" the voice artist asks, adding with a husky
chuckle, "For all claims, please press 4 now ... "
The chuckle is clearly intended to imply, "Don't worry, silly!
There's no way we'd even think about investigating your claim. Don't
be stressed!"
"Sorry about the delay," she continues. Her accent sounds faintly
Geordie. "Please sit tight. We're on our way."
Then the police fraud warning comes, using exactly the same words as
before, as is required by law, but within this soothing context it no
longer sounds at all intimidating.
Less thought goes into the choice of on-hold music, Fish says. "I
just have one rule," she says. "Go for the most inoffensive."
Fish is like a brilliant anthropologist, studying the minutiae of the
human psyche in her quest to come up with increasingly clever ways to
keep us passive while we hold. That is her word: passive.
The pioneers of consumerism, such as Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward
Bernays, would have approved of SOH. Bernays, who invented public
relations in the 1910s, believed the masses were driven by irrational
forces. If they were not kept passive and sated and controlled,
Bernays told his corporate clients such as AT&T, the American Tobacco
Company and General Electric, they might become a dangerously
irrational mob. It was the collective responsibility of corporations
to maintain social order, to turn the people into "happiness
machines" in the words of the then president, Herbert Hoover. These
ideas were at the root of western corporate culture.
I ask Fish if she considers the masses to be rampant and liable to
riot if we are not kept passive by calming sounds while we are on
hold. I expect her to tell me not to be ridiculous, but instead she
says, "Yes." The fact is, speaking as a member of the masses, I do
find a bad on-hold experience more antagonising than it ought to be,
and so I suspect Fish and Bernays are right about us being irrational
beasts who need to be kept soothed.
Last year, a big British utility company commissioned SOH to design
an on-hold experience for them. Fish's idea was to pepper the
recording with comfortingly homely sounds: a kettle boiling, a
doorbell ringing, a dog barking in the distance. Holly recorded the
tape down-stairs in the recording studio, and when it was finished it
was played to a focus group of suburban pensioners.
"One pensioner pointed out that a dog barked at the exact moment the
voice artist asked callers to consider switching to direct debit,"
Fish says. "She wouldn't let it go. She just kept on and on about
this dog."
The pensioner believed, Fish says, that the barking dog was a mind-
control trick orchestrated by the utility company to hypnotise us
into taking out a direct debit. It was an extreme example of
something Fish has been noticing more and more: that the public,
especially the under 40s, are becoming increasingly paranoid and
cynical about corporations. And so SOH has adapted.
Downstairs in the recording studio, Holly is about to audition a
potential new voice artist called Olivia Brown. She is shown into the
green room and sits on a sofa in front of what Holly calls the Wall
of Fame. This is the wall where the autographed photographs of all
the famous voice artists are tacked up. It is a very empty wall. In
fact, there is only one autographed photograph: Julie Dawn Cole, who
played Veruca Salt in the 1971 version of Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory.
The Wall of Fame is likely to remain empty because SOH no longer
likes to use easily recognisable celebrity voices. In the old days,
when celebrity voices were in vogue, the ideal one was Joanna Lumley.
She was posh, and we tend to do what posh people tell us to,
including sit there and wait without complaining, but she was not
hectoring-posh. She was likeably, empathetically posh, which was
perfect. But nowadays, Fish says, the cynical, anti-corporate public
tends to think, "They must have spent a fortune on Joanna Lumley, but
I'm on hold. Perhaps if they'd spent the money they spent on Joanna
Lumley on some operators instead, I wouldn't be on hold now." And so
SOH has skilfully adapted to the new anti-celebrity, anti-globalist
cynicism by instead using everyday, working-class voices, especially
gently spoken Geordies, to tell us that we are in a queue and will be
answered shortly.
(Small, cottage-industry companies, Holly says, are often the
exception; they still like a stiff, RP voice. I suppose this is
because they have got a bit of an inferiority complex. For these
smaller companies, an on-hold recording can be like a curtain:
something to make people think they are bigger than they are. It is
like me having an on-hold recording that says, "For print journalism
press 1. For television presenting press 2 ... ")
Olivia, who is being auditioned today, is a Lancastrian. Holly shows
her into the soundbooth and tells her to imagine herself "as a normal
person, sincere, non-patronising, soothing, lulling, but not too
lulling. Remember, nine times out of 10, the person calling this line
will be in a fragile, vulnerable state of mind, and we don't want to
add to their agitation. OK? Go."
"'We'll try to get you through to a housing support officer as soon
as we can'," recites Olivia, in a faint, soothing, lovely Lancashire
accent.
"Loving it, loving it," says Holly, and I think about how badly human
nature is coming out of my day at SOH. We really are such coiled
springs of pent-up rage that a silence of 2.8 seconds is enough to
send us spiralling over the edge - and then a regional accent is
enough to make us passive again. We are that predictable and that
malleable. Who can blame SOH for unpicking our psyches to keep us
passive on behalf of GlaxoSmithKline and the Royal Bank of Scotland?
search: