A Survey of Secondary Activities of Telephone Callers Who Are Put on Hold

Abstract

This paper examines the results of a study conducted to determine what types of secondary activities callers engage in when they are placed on hold in a telephone call setting. One hundred and one participants were surveyed in order to determine if they performed secondary tasks while on hold, and if so, the types of activities engaged in and the relative amount of time they spent on those activities. Results showed that 79% of callers engaged in some form of secondary activity while on hold. These activities were diverse, with the majority of participants reporting 8 different types of secondary activities. The data from this study will help researchers and IVR designers understand the types of secondary tasks in which callers engage and allow them to design on-hold stimuli that support multi-tasking and enable them to more accurately construct experiments to reflect real world conditions.

Auditory Progress Bars: The effects of Feedback, Endpoint and Free Response on Estimations of Time Remaining

“…For instances in which an auditory stimulus is present, the accuracy of such judgments appears contingent upon the acoustic properties of the heard stimulus . Estimations of elapsed durations are more accurate when listening to stimuli decreasing in pitch over time as opposed to stimuli increasing in pitch over time (Kortum et al 2007;Kortum et al 2006). Judgments of elapsed durations are more accurate when listening to stimuli of longer durations as opposed to stimuli of shorter durations; furthermore, the elapsed durations of shorter stimuli are more likely to be overestimated as opposed to stimuli longer in duration (Kortum, Peres, Knott, Bushey, 2005;Kortum, 2005, Kortum, Peres 2006.…”

“…Callers may mistake the verbal update for the operator having answered their call, causing them to be unnecessarily distracted from their secondary task . A common method for making the hold time palatable is filling the silence with a nonirritating auditory stimulus, but this is usually at the expense of not providing callers with a status indicator or any other means of estimating when their call will be answered (Kortum et al, 2007).…”

Auditory Progress Bars: Estimations of Time Remaining

“…This occurs frequently and businesses report that customers and revenue are lost when the on-hold wait is superfluously unpleasant (Unzicker, 1999). To make the wait more palatable, businesses typically use some sort of sound to fill the silence during the wait (Kortum and Peres, 2007). Furthermore, there is evidence that people are typically more pleased with their on-hold experience if they think the hold time was shorter (Kortum et al, 2007).…”

“…To make the wait more palatable, businesses typically use some sort of sound to fill the silence during the wait (Kortum and Peres, 2007). Furthermore, there is evidence that people are typically more pleased with their on-hold experience if they think the hold time was shorter (Kortum et al, 2007). Moreover, other data shows that listening to different types of sounds results in people over or underestimating the duration of their hold time (Stallmann et al 2008).…”

“…Interestingly, Kortum et al (2007) found that people typically multi-task while they are on hold. For callers to more effectively manage their secondary activity it is important that they be able to approximate how long they will be on hold.…”