Hold Frequency and Duration

Hold Frequency and Duration

When a customer hears “please hold,” they start counting.

Hold time is one of the fastest ways to erode trust and trigger dissatisfaction—especially when it happens more than once in a call. Hold Frequency and Hold Duration are two tightly linked metrics that reveal both how often your agents need to pause a conversation and how long those pauses last.

This isn’t just about impatience. It’s about signals of internal inefficiency, broken workflows, or underprepared agents.

What They Mean

Hold Frequency measures how often an agent places a customer on hold during a single interaction. Hold Duration tracks the total time a customer spends on hold in that conversation.

They’re often analyzed together to assess both friction (how often) and impact (how long). A single long hold might point to a missing process. Multiple short holds suggest the agent is jumping between tools, teams, or tabs—without clear resolution paths.

How to Calculate

If you’re working with structured call data or transcripts, you can calculate these using basic conversation-level aggregation.

Hold Frequency:

Hold Frequency = Count of Hold Events per Conversation

Hold Duration:

Hold Duration = Sum of All Hold Segments per Conversation (in seconds or minutes)

You can also compute:

Average Hold Duration = Total Hold Duration / Hold Frequency

This reveals whether your issue is lots of small holds or a few long ones—a subtle but important operational distinction.

Why It Matters

  1. Customer Experience: Long or repeated holds kill momentum. They make customers feel like they’re being bounced, ignored, or deprioritized.

  2. Agent Enablement: High hold usage can signal that agents don’t have what they need at their fingertips—answers, approvals, or authority.

  3. Process Bottlenecks: Repeated holds often point upstream: outdated knowledge bases, unclear escalation rules, or siloed systems.

  4. Compliance & Risk: In regulated industries, hold behavior can correlate with risky knowledge gaps or compliance delays.

How to Use It

  • Slice by Agent: Are certain agents over-relying on holds?
  • Slice by Topic or Intent: Are specific call reasons more likely to trigger holds?
  • Track Over Time: Did a new tool or policy change hold behavior?
  • Correlate with CSAT or Sentiment: Do longer or more frequent holds correlate with lower satisfaction?

VitalogyCX Principle Alignment

  • Everything is a Signal: Holds aren’t empty time—they’re loaded with meaning.
  • Calibrate to Conversation: Holding a voice call hits differently than holding a chat.
  • Design for Action: Use hold patterns to retrain, restructure, or re-enable.

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