Hold time

Hold time is the time a customer spends on hold after a support agent has answered, for example while the agent checks a system or consults a colleague.

Hold time and queue time. The two are easy to confuse, and contact center software measures them separately. Amazon Connect Customer defines customer hold time as the total time customers spent on hold after being connected to an agent. It includes hold during transfers and excludes time spent in a queue. The wait before anyone answers is a different metric, average queue answer time, also known as average speed of answer. Genesys Cloud likewise defines hold time as the time an agent places a contact on hold during an interaction, and reports total, maximum and average hold time. In everyday speech people call both waits “being on hold”, so check which one a figure measures.

Related metrics. Amazon Connect also counts contacts put on hold one or more times by an agent. Average handle time includes customer hold time, together with the agent’s interaction time and after-contact work, so long holds raise handle time as well.

What drives it. Agents often place a customer on hold to look something up, get approval, or arrange a warm transfer to a colleague. Each of those is a step where information has to move between systems or people while the line stays open.

When the caller is an agent. A customer’s AI agent that phones a business waits in the same queue and sits through the same holds as a person, with minutes billed on both sides. When the two agents exchange a structured task instead, nothing holds a line open. In A2A, the calling agent sends its request, receives a task, and checks its state later or gets updates pushed to it while the business’s agent looks things up.

Neighbouring terms. A callback lets a caller leave the queue and be called back. Average handle time includes hold time.