83 million hours on hold: why UAE callers hate phone menus

"Your call is important to us. Please hold." Few sentences do more damage to a brand. In the UAE, where customers are used to fast service and instant messaging, a long hold queue or a maze of phone options feels like a door being closed. Here is what the research says, and what to replace the phone menu with.

The UAE on hold

A ServiceNow study conducted with ThoughtLab, reported by Campaign Middle East in 2026, surveyed 1,335 UAE respondents.^[1]

• More than 83 million hours a year are spent on hold across the UAE.
• Poor service costs each consumer the equivalent of 10.8 hours a year.
• 45% would switch to a competitor after a single poor or slow experience.

Phone menus make it worse

Interactive voice response (IVR) menus were meant to save time. Often they do the opposite. In a 2019 survey of 2,010 US consumers by Vonage:^[2]

• 61% said IVR menus make for a poor experience.
• 51% said they had abandoned a business altogether because of its IVR.
• Vonage estimated the cost at $262 per customer per year in lost revenue.

Anyone who has listened to eight options, pressed 3, then heard another five options, knows why.

Why effort matters more than delight

In one of the most influential customer service studies ever published, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman surveyed more than 75,000 customers for Harvard Business Review.^[3] Their conclusion was in the title: Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers. What drives loyalty is how easy it is to get a problem solved.

• 59% of customers reported moderate-to-high effort to resolve an issue.
• 59% were transferred, and 56% had to re-explain their issue.
• Among customers with low-effort experiences, 94% intended to buy again.

Hold queues and phone menus are effort in its purest form. The customer is doing work so that your process does not have to.

What callers in the UAE actually want

Put simply:

1. An answer on the first ring.
2. To say what they need in their own words, in Arabic or English.
3. Not to repeat themselves if they are passed to someone else.
4. A person when it matters: complaints, emergencies, complex cases.

Replace "press 1" with "how can I help?"

A conversational AI voice agent removes the menu entirely. The caller says, "I want to change my flight to Thursday" or "أبي أعرف وين وصل طلبي", and the agent understands, checks the booking or order in your system, and either resolves it or routes it to the right person with a summary.

How to move away from your IVR safely

1. Map your top 10 call reasons from call recordings or agent notes.
2. Automate the routine ones first: status, opening hours, rescheduling, documents.
3. Keep a fast path to a human for complaints and anything sensitive.
4. Measure abandoned calls and repeat calls before and after.
5. Expand gradually as you trust the results.

Our travel industry page shows how this works when peak seasons hit, and the inbound voice agent page shows the human-handover controls.

The bottom line

Customers do not hate phones. They hate waiting and repeating themselves. Remove the queue and the menu, answer in their language, and the phone becomes the fastest way to do business with you again.