I recently had to call to pay a highway toll because their system for accepting payments online was broken. The IVR was an endless tree of options, and at each

I recently had to call to pay a highway toll because their system for accepting payments online was broken. The IVR was an endless tree of options, and at each option, it would point out how much time I would save if I paid online. It took several minutes to navigate the phone tree before being placed on hold. Pressing 0 didn't help. I made a point of spending time with the agent talking about the problems with the phone tree. I did so very politely but also very slowly and verbosely - it took several minutes. I think if we were able to create a social convention where people waste n or 2n minutes of the agent's time when the company has wasted n minutes of their times, it could change the incentives. Right now companies save money by having long times. If we could create a movement to do this, leaving customers on hold too long would lead to congestive collapse. Long hold times would end up costing more money than simply having adequate staffing.