What are queue position and estimated wait time announcements — and how do they make the wait feel shorter?

What it actually is

Waiting on the phone is hard mainly because it is blind. In a supermarket line you can see how many people are ahead of you, and decide whether to wait or come back later. On the phone — you hear music, and know nothing. Maybe ten more seconds, maybe twenty minutes.

A queue position announcement gives the caller that information back. When he enters the queue, and from time to time while he waits, the system tells him: "You are third in line," then "You are second in line," and "You are next in line."

An estimated wait time goes one step further: "The estimated wait time is about three minutes." This is even more useful information, but also harder to calculate correctly — more on that below.

Why it works

Many studies of waiting, on the phone and in general, have reached a similar conclusion: people suffer less from a wait they understand. A few well-known principles:

• An unknown wait feels longer than a known wait of the same length.
• Progress is reassuring: hearing "you are second" after "you are third" gives a sense that something is moving.
• Information allows a decision: someone who hears "you are tenth" can choose to call back later, instead of waiting five minutes and hanging up angry.
• A wait without explanation feels like disrespect, and a wait with information feels like order.

The practical result: fewer abandoned calls, and fewer angry callers when the agent finally answers.

Position or time — which is better

The two announcements are different, and each has strengths and weaknesses:

In a small organization, a position announcement is almost always the safe choice. It doesn't promise anything that can't be kept. An estimated time is worth it only when it is reliable — and in a queue of three agents, one long call can throw off any estimate.

How to calculate estimated wait time

The basic calculation is simple: take the average handling time of a call, multiply it by the number of people ahead of the caller, and divide by the number of agents answering. If an average call lasts four minutes, there are three people ahead of you and two agents — the estimate is about six minutes.

In practice it gets complicated quickly:

• Calls are not a uniform length. A twenty-minute call throws off the whole calculation.
• Agents go on break and come back in the middle.
• Some of those waiting will hang up before their turn comes, and that shortens the wait for those behind them.
• At the start of the day there is still no data on today's calls.

That is why systems that announce an estimated time usually round up and use ranges: "less than three minutes," "between five and ten minutes." It is better for the caller to be answered earlier than the promise, than later than it.

How often to play it

A message that repeats too often is annoying. A message that repeats too slowly doesn't help. Here are a few common guidelines:

• When the caller enters the queue — always. This is the moment the caller decides whether to wait.
• Repeat every 45 to 90 seconds — often enough for the caller to feel progress, but not so often that it feels like pestering.
• When the position changes — on systems that support it, play a message only when there is good news.
• Not when the caller is first in line and about to be answered — there is no point starting a message that will be cut off halfway.

Pay attention to the length of the message itself, too. "You are third in line" takes two seconds. If it is preceded by a paragraph like "Your call is important to us, all of our representatives are currently busy serving other customers, please hold" — the caller hears the same speech ten times.

Combine with a callback service

A position announcement works best when it comes with a way out. "You are eighth in line. To get a callback without losing your place, press 1." Callers who have time wait. Callers who don't press 1, hang up, and get a call back when their turn comes.

This combination does the most to reduce hang-ups: the caller gets information, and a choice. More on this in a separate article: Callback Service.

A useful rule of thumb: offer the callback service only when the wait is likely to be long, meaning the caller is far back in the queue or has already been waiting for a while. For someone who is second in line, the offer only causes confusion.

Wording the Messages

The recording itself is just as important as the mechanism. A few recommendations:

• Short: "You are third in line," not "We wish to inform you that your position in the queue is third."
• Warm, but not overly apologetic: "Thank you for waiting, we will answer you shortly" — once, not on every repeat.
• In the callers' language: in an institution whose audience speaks Yiddish or English, it is worth recording in those languages too, or adding a language choice at the entry point.
• One voice: use the same voice for all of the organization's messages, so the experience is consistent.
• With useful information: "You can also email us at..." — sometimes this saves the whole wait.

And between the messages — music on hold or recorded content. Complete silence between messages makes callers think the call was disconnected.

When Not to Announce the Position

There are situations where the announcement does more harm than good:

• A queue with priorities: if important customers "jump" ahead, a regular caller may hear "You are third in line," and then "You are fourth in line." This is very frustrating.
• A very short queue: when most calls are answered within twenty seconds, the announcement only causes delay.
• A very high number: "You are forty-third in line" usually makes callers hang up right away. In that case, it is better to offer the callback service immediately, or play a message explaining that call volume is unusually high.

An example from the field

At the yeshiva "Kol Torah" (a fictitious name), registration for the next year opens once a year, and this week the phone never stops ringing. In the past, parents waited in the queue without knowing for how long, and many hung up after a minute or two and tried again — which only increased the load.

This year they turned on a position announcement at entry and every minute, and added a callback offer for those far back in the queue. Parents who heard they were second in line waited. Those who heard they were tenth pressed for a callback. The number of repeated calls from the same number dropped, and the secretaries said the parents sounded calmer when their calls were answered.

A bit of history

In the first call center phone systems, in the 1970s and 1980s, waiting was simple: a fixed announcement, music, and then a fixed announcement again. The system knew how many calls were waiting, but it did not tell the caller. One reason is that playing a changing number required dedicated equipment to assemble sentences from recordings of words and digits.

When phone systems moved to software, the position announcement became a standard feature. The system builds the sentence from recorded segments — "You are", "third", "in the queue" — and plays it at any moment. Estimated wait time came later, once enough data on call lengths had been collected to calculate a reasonable estimate.

What happens before the queue

The position announcement only starts once the caller is already in the queue. But from the caller's point of view, the wait began much earlier — when they dialed. If there is a long opening greeting and an IVR menu with three levels before the queue, the caller has already "waited" a minute before even hearing their position.

So it is worth reviewing the whole path, not just the queue:

• Shorten the opening greeting to one or two sentences.
• Reduce the number of levels in the menu.
• Move general announcements ("Please note our new hours") to the queue wait time, instead of before the menu.
• Check the call path to see how long it takes to reach the queue, with a test call and a stopwatch.

And remember: when measuring how long people waited in the queue, it is standard to count from the moment they entered the queue — not from the moment they dialed. Menu time is part of the experience, but it is not part of the wait for an agent. Both numbers matter, and it is worth looking at each one separately.

Test the announcements yourself

The best way to know how the wait sounds is to call. Once a month, and especially after any change, someone on the team should call the main line from a mobile phone, wait in the queue for a few minutes, and listen carefully:

• Does the position announcement sound clear and at a reasonable pace?
• Is the music not too loud or choppy?
• Do the announcements not repeat too often?
• Is the callback offer clear, and does pressing the key work?
• Is there an old announcement that is no longer accurate — about a holiday that has passed or hours that have changed?

Five minutes of testing like this reveals things no report will show. And if something doesn't sound good to you, it doesn't sound good to anyone who is waiting either. It's worth writing down what was checked and when, so next time it's clear what has changed.