How long have you been on hold?

bap98189

What's the longest time anyone has ever spent on hold calling a utility company or similar.

This question is inspired by the 67 minutes and counting since I dialled the number for EDF (it's a freephone number and on speaker whilst I'm doing other things). Apparently every 30 seconds "my call has moved up the queue".

fluffnutter

Wow! That's some quality customer service you got there. Don't worry; they'll cut you off soon

bap98189

Finally answered after 72 minutes. If I were paying for the call I would be right hacked off.

relic

1 hour and 23 minutes with the tax office, I was at work though and left it on speaker phone, completely forgot what I rang up for when they eventually answered.

ProdigalScouser

A shade under an hour to Virgin, fortunately, via 150 from my Virgin landline. Since I got the Indian call centre, they couldn't find my account and helpfully suggested tha I hang up and dial 150... and keep doing so until someone found my account...

fluffnutter

bap98189 wrote: »

Finally answered after 72 minutes. If I were paying for the call I would be right hacked off.

And did they resolve your issue, or do you have to phone again?

Procrastinator333

HMRC have been consistently the worst for me. I consider it a miracle if sub 20 mins to answer the phone. Scumbags.

But worst ever individual wait was a company called Ebuyer. They are normally a good company. But one day a while back, I was in quite a hurry to find out where my order was. Handily there was one of those systems that tells you - You are X in the Queue. So I started at about 20 and waited. It took ages to get up to about 10. So in the end I decided to call back later. Probably half hour on that first call. Called back later. Still about 20 in the queue. So figured I would stick it out this time. Something like 90 mins later I was up to number 1 in the queue. After another 15 mins of being number 1 I realised something was really wrong and gave up.

The next day I phoned up and got straight through. They had actually been closed that day, but the muppets had forgotten to turn off the phone system and so everyone was just being put in the queue. The queue only went down when people gave up and hung up. Not good. Got somethign like £9 out of them for my phone bill as it wasn't a freephone number. Though I would rather have had my time back!

Logan112

An hour and a half to a local theatre trying to get tickets for a show my daughter was in.

Dave_C_2

I found ringing airlines once a year to arrange extra leg room seats to be the longest on hold. Now done on-line, for a fee of course

One airline had a system where it announced you are number <n> in the queue, with it going down as you moved towards the head of the queue. This was great as you could judge how fast the queue was going down and how long you would have to wait.

Ring up - you are number 50 - so you ring later.
Ring up - you are number 9 - so you hang on.

All telephone queue systems should do this.

Dave

VT82

My worst experience is more a marathon than a one-off. That would be ringing TalkTalk when my broadband wasn't working, at off-peak times (the only time I could call) when they have few people on.

Every time it was 20+ minutes to get to Customer Services, then 20+ minutes to get put through to 2nd Line Support. But it was a marathon because they could never fix the problem, and the same experience happened day after day.

Worst of all, I bought a dirt cheap corded phone (really short cord) specifically to call them, as I didn't have a home phone beforehand, so it really was like being chained to the phone!

In terms of one-offs, it would be giving up on Tesco Bank after about 40 minutes when they were going through their problems a few weeks back.

kitty_cat_2

I spent just over an hour on hold once to BT. During this time I made tea, fed kids and washed up - all while holding onto cordless phone. Needless to say I'm no longer with BT!