onholdwith

Who are YOU #OnHoldWith? The Top 10 Worst Companies to Call in 2019

By Ben Ringshall on December 11, 2019

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HOLD IT: If you’ve ever sent a tweet complaining about being on hold, then chances are you’ve been featured on the Fonolo-powered website: onholdwith.com. It collects and curates the millions of Twitter complaints about being put on hold, and it has just released its annual list of hold-time offenders.

The site, launched by Fonolo a few years back, this year collected over a whopping hundreds of thousands of posts mentioning the phrase “on hold with” from Twitter. As we noted last year, Twitter has inreasingly become a go-to customer service platform for those wishing to air out their frustrating customer service experiences.

Tellingly, this year’s list indicates that brands are still leaving their customers hanging by forcing them to wait on hold. Lessening hold times should be a priority, as it will no doubt grow customer loyalty and faith in brands.

This year, some big surprises: Virgin Media, Verizon, and United Airlines are among the top culprits in the annual list of The Worst Companies to Call in 2019.

Did your company make the list?

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Top 10 OnHoldWith Offenders this Quarter

By Nicolina Savelli on July 5, 2017

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Every quarter we head on over to onholdwith.com and countdown which companies are being called out by the customer service Twitter police (aka consumers) for long hold times. You can view the results from last quarter here, and do some of your own comparing and contrasting from this quarter’s offenders.

In just a quick glance, it’s not too hard to tell which organizations have worked hard to improve hold times over the last few months, while others continue to fail time and time again. If we could place bets, we suspect some of these reoccurring offenders still haven’t nailed down the whole “call-back” thing yet.

Don’t forget to check out our annual list of the worst companies to call this year.

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Delta’s Flight Cancellations Led to a Call Center Meltdown

By Daniela Puzzo on April 13, 2017

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Delta’s Flight Cancellations Led to a Call Center Meltdown

It’s no secret to the savvy traveller that most leading airlines will limit the number of empty seats to help boost profits. The problem is that when flights get overbooked paid passengers have to be “accommodated” to give up their seats, or in Delta’s case, it makes it difficult to rebook passengers whose flights have been cancelled. The airline industry is certainly getting its share of bad press lately. Although, unlike the abomination of an innocent bystander being ripped from a United Airlines flight, at least Delta has good reason for its negative publicity.

Last week, Atlanta was hit with severe thunderstorms, flash floods, and hail resulting in a logistical nightmare for Delta Airlines. The storm came crashing in on Wednesday, but the cancellation of flights trickled into Friday, and by the end of the week 3,000 flights had been cancelled!
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Winter Blues: Top 10 Hold Time Offenders this Quarter [Infographic]

By Nicolina Savelli on March 9, 2017

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Winter Blues: Top 10 Hold Time Offenders this Quarter According to the 2016 Microsoft State of Global Customer Service Report almost half (44%) of global customers feel that it takes more effort for them, than it does for the brand, to resolve their issues. In the U.S. alone, it rises to 65%; in the UK, 72%. At Fonolo, we have a secret weapon for figuring out what companies are creating a social media frenzy of frustrated customers: onholdwith.com. The website tracks complaints on Twitter from people waiting on hold. Last year, we announced the ‘Top 25 Worst Hold Time Offenders of 2016’ and saw just how much this problem resonates with the American people. NBC, ABC 7on Your Side, turned to their community, and to the companies mentioned, to dig deeper into the issue. And we’ve turned this into an annual list; You can find this year’s worst companies to call right here. And we’re not done yet. Callers are still regularly experiencing long hold times and we won’t stop reporting until we put an end to this problem for good.

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5 Ways to Avoid Waiting on Hold

By Daniela Puzzo on January 12, 2017

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5 Ways to Avoid Waiting on Hold I recently read a great analogy on what it feels like to call customer service today. Imagine being a child again and asked to do your math homework – a subject you’re unfortunately not very good at. You end up procrastinating the task for as long as possible because deep down you know it will take much longer than expected, and somewhere in the process you’ll be throwing up your hands in frustration. Speaking to a live agent is amazingly similar to doing your dreaded math homework.

Calling customer support is an incredibly annoying task that often becomes overwhelmingly frustrating. First, you’ve got to find the correct phone number for your region, then you have to listen to the maddening automated system to navigate your way to the right department, and more often than not, you’ll be stuck with some elevator music while you wait on hold to speak to an actual human.

In an effort to make this experience a little less frustrating we’ve constructed some ways that you can avoid hold time and get an answer to your question quicker.

Here are 5 tricks to follow: Continue reading →

Mo’ Mustaches, Mo’ Happiness: The Rise of the Movember Movement

By Nicolina Savelli on October 26, 2016

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Mo’ Mustaches, Mo’ Happiness: The Rise of the Movember Movement The history of Movember began 17 short years ago when a local news channel reported that a group of men from Adelaide, Australia had coined the term “Movember” and the idea of growing moustaches for charity throughout the month of November. Since then, the idea has exploded into a month-long international event. At Fonolo, we like getting into the spirit of Movember in our own quirky way. Last year we tracked how much hold time a number of companies had accrued over the month of November and thought, “Wow, you could probably grow a moustache in that amount of time!” *Lightbulb goes off* So, if time is money, why not support Movember by giving back to the foundation based off the amount of hold time a company accumulates over the month? This year we’re asking the same of these #onholdwith offenders. Continue reading →

How to Avoid Pissing Customers Off on Support Calls

By Nicolina Savelli on August 10, 2016

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How to Avoid Pissing Customers Off on Support Calls Recently, we saw a catastrophic customer service meltdown at Southwest Airlines, initiated by an unforeseen IT outage. For the most part, technology does its job to help businesses run more smoothly, but sometimes, things go a little haywire. Some businesses plan ahead to properly manage and control its customer service relationships during a crisis, and then there are others, who just sit in glass towers, crossing their fingers and toes.

Lack of preparation for unpredictable incidents like this can result in a loss of customer loyalty, or worse, a complete boycott of your company. Let’s take a look at how some of the most successful companies curb complaints and avoid turning their customers against them.

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Who Are You #OnHoldWith? Top 10 Twitter Complaints to Start the Year

By Nicolina Savelli on February 3, 2016

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72% of customers who make a complaint on Twitter expect the company to respond within one hour. But many of those customers are not using social media as their primary channel of communication. In fact, these complaints are a direct result of the phone channel and customers being kept on hold for too long.

OnHoldWith.com has aggregated those complaints and uncovered the top 10 worst hold-time offenders to start the year. In naming these #onholdwith fails, we’re also serving up the twitter rants that had us laughing, crying, or down-right enraged. We keep this list updated — you can see 2019’s worst companies to call here.

Let’s start at number ten and work our way down to the company who received the most #OnHoldWith complaints:

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Your EWT is … 798 Minutes (or “On Hold With … Mayweather/Pacquiao”)

By Jason Bigue on May 6, 2015

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If you were #onholdwith your cable provider on Saturday night, you weren’t alone. While many people (myself included) were enjoying a drink or two (or, ahem, more) while watching the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight, a record number of viewers were trying desperately to get help ordering the Pay-Per-View event. Many of them took to Twitter to vent, something that caught the attention of onholdwith.com (OHW), a site that catalogs complaints from frustrated Twitter users, stuck on hold: Continue reading →

Call Center Wait Times: Story Unveiled by Boston Globe

By Jason Bigue on February 11, 2015

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If there’s one thing most of us hate, it’s waiting on hold.

After all, who would consciously choose to waste their time with a phone receiver stuck to one ear, all the while listening to someone repeat the soothing phrase, “… your call is important to us …”? (The answer, of course, is no one.)

That doesn’t mean that consumers have to just take it. A growing number of frustrated callers have taken to social media to vent their frustration at the very companies who have placed them in telephone limbo. So many, in fact, that we decided to build a website to keep track and publish complaints from all of the Twitter users suck on hold: onholdwith.com.

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