What hold times are really costing you

Forty days. That's the average amount of time a person spends on hold over the course of their lifetime. 

Throughout the years, the hold queue has become a fixture of customer support, one that companies have spent years optimizing through better hold music and more accurate wait-time estimates. The queue itself has become a reality every customer assumes, and companies have used it to avoid solving what lies beneath.

But recent research from Parloa suggests that using hold music as a bandage over poor customer support won’t hold for much longer. In surveying 1,001 US consumers for the Consumer Patience Index 2026, we found that most consumers are just three minutes away from disengaging with support entirely, and one-third would rather switch brands than be put on hold. 

The survey didn’t just offer a record of frustration, it uncovered the extent to which frustration is driving costly action.

Companies are breaking the one channel customers trust most

When something goes wrong, 38.9% of people reach for the phone first, nearly three times more than any other channel. With so much faith in voice support, the cost of it not working is high.

But the reality is that most brands are not delivering voice support that consumers can trust.

Our survey found that 61% of consumers admitted to yelling at an automated system just to reach a human faster. And when it comes to IVR, which constitutes 93% of enterprise voice support systems, only 7% say it adequately meets their needs. Failed automation has led customers to assume bad technology.

Every time a call ends without resolution, frustration increases and trust erodes, with brand loyalty going with it. Over time, the channel that should be a company's best opportunity to hold onto a customer becomes the place it loses most of them.

Every point of friction is a loyalty risk 

There's a tendency to think of bad support experiences as isolated incidents, unfortunate moments that customers will forgive if the product is good enough. This survey’s data doesn't support that perspective.

When a customer has to repeat their issue three times across two transfers before reaching someone who can actually help, they're not just annoyed in the moment. Roughly a third of consumers report having intense reactions to bad support experiences, from yelling at loved ones to throwing phones. Poor experiences lead consumers to draw conclusions about how much the company values their time. When they're put on hold with no estimated wait time and no option to be called back, the message they receive is that their patience is something to be assumed rather than respected.

83.2% of consumers in our survey said their service experience directly shapes their brand loyalty. That tells us that support isn't a separate function from the customer relationship. It is the customer relationship.

The word-of-mouth cost no one is tracking

What makes poor CX so expensive isn't just the customers who leave. It's the ones who talk.

When customers have a bad experience, they don't necessarily tell the company. They tell each other. In our survey, nearly half of the consumers who reported having a bad customer experience told friends and family about it. More than a quarter shared it publicly via social media.

Bad CX doesn't just end a customer relationship. It shapes the first impression of every person in that customer's network before those people may have ever interacted with the brand. The cost of winning any of those people back is far higher than the cost of getting the support experience right in the first place.

What customers are actually asking for

The Consumer Patience Index isn't only a record of what's broken. Survey respondents also explained what good feels like to them.

To them, good feels like being treated as if their time is being respected, that the system they're dealing with actually understands them, and that when something goes wrong, they won't have to fight their way through a maze to get it fixed.

84.9% of respondents said they'd continue using automated support if it consistently resolved their issues. With the technology available today, there's no reason this expectation can't be met.

The companies that unhold their customers won't just stop the churn. They'll earn the kind of loyalty that comes from a customer who expected to be frustrated and wasn't.

The Parloa Consumer Patience Index 2026 surveyed 1,001 US consumers in Spring 2026. Download the full report