What Is Call Hold and What Does the Caller Hear While Waiting?

What it actually is

"One moment, I'm checking on the computer." Almost every work call includes a moment like this. You can leave the handset on the desk, but then the caller hears the whole office — conversations, typing, an argument about yesterday's order. Hold solves this: the call stays connected, but the two sides are separated. The caller hears music on hold or a message, and you are free.

When you come back, you press Hold again, or the line key of the held call, and the call continues from the same point. The caller did not have to dial again, and did not hear anything of what happened in the office in the meantime.

Hold is also the basis of other actions: attended transfer, three-way calling, and switching to a waiting call — in all of them the first call is placed on hold first.

Hold vs. mute

Two keys that get mixed up all the time, and there is an important difference between them:

The danger of mute: the caller hears complete silence, and after a few seconds starts asking "Hello? Are you there?". For a moment longer than a few seconds, hold is better. And another warning: with mute you keep hearing the caller, but people sometimes forget that the caller may hear you too when you un-mute in the middle of a sentence.

What the caller hears

This is the important decision in hold, because it is the only thing the caller experiences. The options:

• Music: the most common. It shows that the call is still connected. In Haredi organizations it is common to choose niggunim or music that suits the audience.
• Recorded messages: information about the organization, business hours, upcoming events. Can be combined with music.
• A shiur or short Torah thoughts: some institutions play short clips of a shiur — the caller makes use of the time.
• Silence: the worst option. It sounds like a disconnect, and people hang up.
• A short beep every few seconds: accepted in some systems. Better than silence, less pleasant than music.

There is a separate article on choosing, recording, and setting it up: Music on Hold.

Where the music comes from: the phone or the PBX

There are two technical ways to play something during hold, and the difference affects what the caller hears:

• From the PBX: when you press Hold, the phone notifies the PBX, and the PBX plays the caller the music that was set for the organization. Everyone hears the same thing, on every extension.
• From the phone itself: some phones have a built-in hold tone, and sometimes it is heard instead of the organization's music. The result — callers who hear different things depending on the extension.

In most cloud PBXs the accepted way is for the PBX to play the music. If callers report hearing silence or a beep during hold on a particular extension, it is worth checking that phone's settings.

How long you can hold

Time on hold feels several times longer to the one waiting. One minute on hold feels like three, and three minutes like forever. A few accepted rules:

• Ask first: "May I put you on hold for a moment?" — and wait for the answer. Most people will say yes, but the question itself shows respect.
• Say how long: "I need a minute to check" — and keep to it.
• Come back every 30–45 seconds if the check takes longer: "I'm still checking, just a moment."
• Offer to call back if it will take more than two minutes: "This will take me a few minutes, may I call you back in a quarter of an hour?"
• Say thank you when you return: "Thank you for waiting."

The simplest rule: do not leave on hold someone you would not want to leave waiting in front of your desk at the same time. And if the wait did run long, a short apology when you return — "Sorry that took a while" — brings back most of the patience lost along the way.

A forgotten hold

It happens in every office: someone put a call on hold, was called to another room, and came back ten minutes later. Or they put it on hold, answered another call, and focused on that one. The first caller keeps hearing music until they give up and hang up.

Many PBXs have a hold reminder: after a set time, the phone beeps or rings to remind you that there is a call on hold. If your phone supports it, it is worth turning on. On phones with line keys, the held call is marked by a blinking light — a sign that is hard to ignore.

And for managers: the screen that shows the active calls on the PBX shows calls that last a long time. A call that has lasted twenty minutes on the secretary's extension, while the secretary is talking on another line, is probably a forgotten hold.

Hold, parking, and transfer

Hold is the foundation, and two related actions are built on it:

• Hold: the call waits with you. Only you, from that phone, can resume it.
• Parking: the call waits in a shared place, and anyone can pick it up from any phone.
• Transfer: the call goes to another extension, and you drop out of it.

If you put a call on hold to find out who can handle it, and end up transferring — that is perfectly fine, it is an attended transfer. But if you put it on hold and then go looking for the colleague in the hallway — parking would probably have been a better fit.

Hold in a queue and a call center

In a service center, hold is part of the daily work — and therefore part of the measurement. Many call centers measure how long on average customers wait on hold in the middle of a call, and not only how long they waited in the queue before being answered. Long, repeated holds usually point to a problem with knowledge or tools: the agent cannot find the information quickly, or has to ask someone else every time. In such cases, a small improvement in tools — a screen with the information, a page of frequently asked questions, access to the order system — saves more waiting time than any change in the PBX settings.

In a small organization there is no need to calculate averages. It is enough to pay attention: if the same question causes a long hold again and again, it is worth preparing an answer sheet next to the phone, or giving the secretaries access to the information they need.

Hold on different phones

• Desk IP phone: a dedicated Hold key, and a blinking light on the line key of the held call. You resume by pressing the same key.
• Cordless phone: usually in the in-call menu, or a side key. It is worth checking in advance where.
• Softphone: a hold button on the call screen, usually with a symbol of two parallel lines.
• Analog phone through an adapter: there is no Hold key. You use the Flash key, which puts the call on hold and opens a dial tone. Pressing again brings it back.

For every type, it is worth trying once on an internal call, to know exactly what to press — and not to hang up on a customer by mistake.

An example from the field

At the "Otiyot" print shop (a fictitious name), the secretary, Chaya, answers customers asking about the status of their order. On every call she puts the customer on hold, goes to ask the printer, and comes back. Customers complained that they wait a lot — and that sometimes they hear silence and it seems the call was disconnected.

Two changes solved most of the problem. First, they set music on hold, so the silence disappeared. Second, the printer started updating order status in a shared spreadsheet, and Chaya no longer needs to go and ask. Holds shortened from a minute and a half to a few seconds, and most calls now involve no hold at all.

A bit of history

The old office phones had a big red key marked HOLD, and next to it a row of transparent line keys that lit up. When you press HOLD, the line light starts blinking — a sign that a call is waiting there. Anyone who ever worked in such an office remembers the blinking board at busy hours.

Music on hold was born, according to the common story, almost by accident: in the 1960s it was discovered that a wire of a telephone system touching a beam in a building carried radio broadcasts from a nearby station to the held calls. The idea caught on, and since then music on hold has been a regular part of every PBX. Today, in a cloud PBX, both the hold and the music are software — and you can choose for each organization exactly what its callers will hear.

Hold and sound quality

During hold, the music reaches the caller in the same voice channel as speech — and so it is affected by the same things. Telephony codecs are built for speech, not music, so rich music with many instruments may sound hoarse or choppy. Simple music — one or two instruments, a clear voice — sounds better on the phone.

This also explains a common complaint: "The music on hold sounds terrible." Usually the problem is not the PBX, but the file that was chosen. It is worth choosing a clip that sounds good even on a small mobile speaker, and testing it in a test call before leaving it for all callers. It is also better for its volume to be similar to the volume of speech, so the caller does not have to hold the phone away from their ear.