By Libby Purves

SINCE I do my family’s banking, not to mention dealing with Npower and holiday bookings, I tend to hear a lot of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It feels rather sad to associate it with a red-mist rage and drown it with a torrent of oaths.

It’s not always Vivaldi: sometimes it’s Mozart being cheerily massacred on a synthesiser, or one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s more soothing little tunes. Though these, mysteriously, are sometimes played at the wrong speed or with peculiar new rhythms that mean you can’t even calm your fury by singing along.

This universal torment is called On Hold Music. Amazingly, there are companies devoted to selling it to other companies, utilities and banks who know perfectly well that they intend to keep their customers waiting.

The Muzak-merchants’ sales pitch about this crippling waste of our lives is soothing and positive: ‘ Why not use a captivating combination of music and voice?’ they ask seductively ‘to enhance customer experience and showcase your business identity?’ Showcase, bah! In reality, it all comes down to the bottom line.

Hiring enough competent phone staff costs money. A few companies do achieve this — and the shorter your wait, the more helpful the operator is likely to be. That’s because it’s more likely his or her life is not spent being shouted at by people made desperate by George Michael’s Careless Whisper.

My own bank, First Direct, is a model in this regard and I was pleased to see it score highly in one survey of wait times. My broadband and phone providers, on the other hand, scored low. Which might explain some of the kick-marks on our kitchen door.

I suspect some organisations have worked out that if customers know ringing up will leave them sobbing in frustration, in the end they will use the website. Dealing with customers online is cheaper, since computer algorithms hardly cost you anything. Nor do they demand maternity pay and loo-breaks.

But if your website is confusing and slow, drags people round in circles with fatuous ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, then locks them out when they get the password wrong twice, customers have to call anyway. And listen to your annoying music and soothing lies about how ‘your call is important to us’. No it isn’t. If it was, you’d have hired someone to answer it.

One woman — according to a letter in a newspaper — waited 18 minutes on the phone to NatWest, only to be told she was in a queue of 472. I have never hit that level of corporate abuse. But I often wait just as long. Usually with the phone beside me set to speaker, so I can get on with something else. The danger is that when a living human voice eventually speaks from the phone, you’re so excited you push the wrong button and cut yourself off.

Business schools are now interested in ‘On Hold Rage’: a research group in Manchester took over a call centre for three weeks and tried different music. Instead of instrumental or synthesised numbers, they played pop songs with words. Some were just ordinary love songs, others what they called ‘ pro- social’ lyrics about being nice to people. The Beatles’ Help was tried, and Michael Jackson’s Heal The World. Then they assessed callers’ levels of anger. The pop songs apparently didn’t bother customers any more than Muzak.

But they got angrier than usual when played lyrics about helping. Probably because nobody was helping them, and they felt mocked. If only they had tried some really agonising emotional song such as She’s Not There or It Ain’t Me, Babe.

And although the operators can’t hear the waiting music, they reported feeling less emotionally exhausted when dealing with customers who heard regular music, as opposed to the stuff about helping and caring.

At least someone’s researching it. And businesses may eventually work out that despite the saying, music does not unfailingly soothe a savage breast. What does is a polite, prompt, live human voice saying those magical words: ‘How can I help you?’

It’s estimated that we spend 43 days of our lives on hold. If the terrible music doesn’t make you want to dig an early grave, upbeat voiceovers thanking you for your patience will.