Ask a founder who chose the on-hold music their support line plays and most will not know the answer. It came with the phone system, or a vendor’s default, or whatever a junior ops hire picked in ten minutes years ago and nobody has revisited since. Meanwhile every customer who calls in is, by definition, already dealing with a problem - which makes the phone system one of the few brand touchpoints guaranteed to reach someone in a bad mood, and one of the least deliberately designed.
The IVR menu is a first impression read out loud
“For billing, press one. For support, press two.” Nobody wrote that script thinking about tone - it was assembled functionally, menu option by menu option, by whoever configured the system. But it is the first thing a customer hears when they call, spoken in a voice the company chose, with wording the company chose, before a human ever picks up. A company that would never let an untrained employee greet a walk-in customer has, without noticing, let exactly that happen on the phone.
The wait itself is a message
Hold music paired with silence between loops, or a generic beep every fifteen seconds, or a canned “your call is important to us” on a loop, actively signals the opposite of what it says. Customers do the math - a company that cared would have staffed the line better, or at minimum, would have used the wait to say something useful instead of nothing. A short, specific message about what to expect, updated to reflect real wait times instead of a static loop recorded once and forgotten, costs almost nothing and is heard by every single caller in the worst moment a phone channel produces.
Why this gets skipped
It’s not that founders don’t care about brand voice. It’s that the phone system feels like infrastructure, not marketing - a technical decision made once during setup and never revisited, the same category of choice as which email provider to use. But infrastructure choices that a customer directly experiences are not neutral. A payment gateway a customer never sees can be chosen on price alone. A phone tree every frustrated customer hears cannot.
The fix is smaller than it sounds
This isn’t a call for an expensive rebuild of the phone system. It’s a fifteen-minute audit: call the support line, listen to the whole thing as a customer would, and ask whether the tone, the wording, and the wait match how the company wants to be experienced at its worst moment. Most companies that do this audit find the answer is no, and most can fix it in an afternoon. The reason so few ever run the audit is that almost nobody thinks to put “call your own support line” on a brand checklist - even though it is one of the few touchpoints guaranteed to reach every customer who is currently the least happy with the company.