Music on Hold

Whichever retard thought playing background music when placing a call on hold was cool. what was he thinking really!! Indian companies think it is pretty cool to play the SOOTHING music. They must be thinking,

Yay, we anyway screw up all the time, lets play this awesome shit ass music and make our customers feel jolly good about being duped by us.

Does anyone know when this stupid trend began? Even if we pardoned them for playing music, the choice of music is atrocious! Unbelievably irritating. To be honest it is something like

pa pa pa paan, pa pa pa paan

Sounds familiar? Yes it is similar to Kolaveri mid verse but that has a nice music to it! Here its more like a buffalo got stuck in a trumpet and is howling for help. Come on guys, it just makes the already pissed off customer cut the call out of horrific kolaveri! Well it sort of was the plan of the companies I guess. Few companies have the decency of giving the customer the option of turning of the music, like GoDaddy.com but most of the companies in my country pay no heed to such customer requirements.

The music they play is also not crystal clear, seriously with all the advancements in technology you cant make the music play nice and clear? The play some stupid recording, probably done on my great granddad’s broken tape recorder! It goes karrr kar karrrr kar karrrr kar. Epic face palm situations!

What prompted me to write this post? Well my recent interaction with Flipkart! I’m sure no one would ever complain about Flipkart, their service is pure brilliance except when it comes to a reverse pickup of an order cause by the idiotic payment gateway in place on their site. I had this issue regarding reverse pickup with them [the actual story of the issue requires at least a 1000 words! when i find time it will be written.], I had to call them around 10 times, and each time I requested the person who answered my call to not play the stupid music but no he won’t listen probably because he did not know how to turn the darned thing off! The last time I called, I requested the guy to not put me on hold and he did oblige. Well I spoke decently and did not shout for once. Hello people at Flipkart, any plans to remove that music from your call hold?

Few companies might have thought, why play music? Lets have a lady with a beautiful voice remind the caller that

Your call is important to us! Please hold the line while our customer care associates finish digging their noses and eat their lunch.

Why don’t you just tell us the approximate waiting time left? Probably every minute or so and not like every 10 seconds the way it is happening now! We all know you don’t give a rat’s fart about us.

To make things worse now, we also give people the option of putting caller tunes so that their dear friend can listen to some absolutely crap quality recording of a song when waiting for you to answer the call. Some operators even take the liberty to set a song for you without you asking them to.

An epic example of this would be Aircel, Karnataka. I don’t know how it is in the other states but in Bangalore this is a widespread problem. I have a small request to make to Aircel

We love Karnataka, and we would like to show it in our own way. Please don’t poke your really long nose and set patriotic kannada songs as my caller tune!

I call my friends and some old song in the crappiest recordings possible is played over and over and over! I like the old tring tring better than this stupidity!

This is an excerpt from wikipedia

Most MOH systems are integrated into a telephone system designed for businesses via an audio jack on the telephone equipment labeled “MOH”. There are also some units with built in message on hold capabilities and units designed for small businesses without an extensive phone system.

Music and messages on hold are played using either physical or virtual media.

Today, equipment that supports physical media usually plays CDs. Some older systems may still use cassette tapes (sometimes employing endless-loops), or reel-to-reel tape players. In each case, the unit loads the media into a digital memory chip to prevent premature wearing of the mechanical parts.

Equipment that supports virtual media generally plays MP3 files. Several types of units play these files. USB Flash Drive units allow an MP3 file to be received electronically, downloaded to a flash drive and connected to the player. Ethernet based remote load units connect via the network to a remote IP address. Phone line based remote load systems allow for a connection via an analog telephone line and dialing the number belonging to the unit. For VoIP phone systems, MP3s are loaded without any equipment.

Newer technology allows MP3 files to be downloaded automatically from the internet so that messages (or interesting content in the form of news and weather, amongst many) can be changed daily. The new “Online On Hold” technology makes the older technology redundant since it requires no additional hardware. All these systems allow analog-to-digital audio storage and playback.

The newest units as of 2011 allow productions to be downloaded via the Internet or played through a USB flash drive. This allows for larger files and higher quality formats.

My only request to the companies is, please stop playing music or at least give us the option to stop it! If you are really adamant please improve the quality of whatever you are playing and try to keep it fresh! Don’t drive away customers with your retarded practices.