The Effect of Auditory Progress Bars on Consumer's Estimation of Telephone wait Time

Abstract

This paper describes the evaluation of four auditory progress bars (APB's) to see if they had the potential to garner high satisfaction scores from users while simultaneously having a positive impact on those callers' perception of hold time during a call to a customer service representative. The APB's varied by sound dimension (pitch/duration change), polarity (increasing/decreasing) and wait time. APB did not impact wait perception significantly for sound dimension or polarity. Analysis of the first call a participant made to the system showed a strong interaction affect, with better performance in the increasing condition for the duration APB, and better performance for the decreasing condition in the pitch APB. However, extremely low customer satisfaction scores for all of the APB's indicated that participants were unhappy with the stimuli. The data provide guidance for the continuing exploration into the proper design of both effective and desirable auditory progress bars.

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