Stop Paying Staff to Wait on Hold. An AI Voice Agent Can.

What is an on-hold agent?

It is a voice agent pointed the other way. Instead of answering your phone, it makes the calls your team keeps putting off.

The shape of those calls is always the same. Dial a big organisation. Fight the menu.

Wait. Ask three questions. Write down the answer.

Total value of the conversation: four minutes. Total cost: an hour of your best person's day.

The agent does the whole loop. It dials, holds as long as it takes, has the conversation, and files the answer with a transcript attached. The menu-fighting part works the way we described in how agents handle IVR menus.

How bad is the hold problem in NZ and Australia, really?

Bad enough that the numbers read like satire, and these ones are real.

ServiceNow commissioned research counted 123 million hours on hold for Australians in 2024. That is about 11 hours per person, and the fourth annual increase in a row. The NZ version of the study found 24 million hours, with government the only sector getting worse.

The public queues you deal with publish their own numbers. Inland Revenue's 2024-25 annual report shows two million calls received and 1.5 million answered. Half a million calls a year never reach a person, and the official target only asks for 60 percent.

Across the Tasman, the ATO's own service results average nine minutes a call. Only 41 percent of tax practitioner calls got answered inside seven minutes. The ATO also states plainly that it blocks calls from entering the queue when demand runs too hot.

And at the sharp end, RNZ recorded a two hour seven minute wait on the Work and Income line. When RNZ tested it themselves, their shortest wait was over 70 minutes.

Why do the official averages understate your experience?

Because the metric definitions quietly exclude the worst outcomes. Read the footnotes and the trick is right there.

IRD's answer-speed measure excludes abandoned calls, and a voicemail can count as answered. Services Australia excludes any call that ends within five minutes, and time in the menu does not count as waiting.

The most honest sentence in any of these reports belongs to Services Australia. It states it could have hit its 70 percent service target by applying at least 3.5 million more congestion messages. A congestion message is a recording that turns you away, and it counts as a handled call.

So when your team says the queue was worse than the published average, believe them. The averages are graded on a curve you cannot see.

What did a US dental group prove about handing these calls to AI?

That the whole category can come off your payroll's plate.

SuperDial is a US company that automates healthcare admin calls. Its customer West Coast Dental runs more than 10,000 insurance status calls a month through the agent. Behind that sat a backlog of nearly 70,000 unresolved claims.

SuperDial's funding announcement says clearing it by hand needed five new hires.

Investors put US$15 million behind that Series A, and by mid 2026 SuperDial's site claims more than five million completed calls. A bigger peer, Infinitus, reports over 200 million minutes of these conversations automated. These are vendor-published figures, but the direction is unmistakable. In the US, waiting on hold is becoming a machine's job.

Which calls should a NZ or AU business hand over first?

Start where the queue is verified and the questions are routine.

When a human finally answers, the agent discloses it is an AI calling on behalf of your business, asks your questions, and captures the answers. Anything unexpected gets flagged to your team with the transcript.

What does the maths look like at 80 cents a minute?

Honest answer: the win is your person's time, not the per-minute price.

Calls run at about 80 cents a minute, billed by the second, and the meter runs while the agent holds. A 40 minute IRD wait costs around $32 of agent time. If the alternative was your accountant at $200 an hour making that call, you are miles ahead. If it was an admin person on minimum wage, the per-minute gap narrows.

But that comparison misses the real structure of the win. The agent makes five calls in parallel and starts dialling the moment lines open. It never gets pulled onto something else, and it never forgets to write the answer down.

Your person cannot do four minutes of work during a 40 minute hold. They lose the hour. The business loses whatever that hour was for.

Count the hold hours your team logged last month. Price them at what those people are paid to actually do. That number is the budget this replaces.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will IRD or an insurer even talk to an AI on our behalf?

That turns on the counterparty and the request. Routine status enquiries with proper reference numbers usually proceed once the agent identifies itself and your business. Accounts gated behind personal verification still need your authorised human. The agent's job becomes handing them a prepared call at the front of the queue.

What happens if the queue hangs up or blocks the call?

The agent logs the outcome and retries on a schedule instead of giving up quietly. Blocked and abandoned attempts show in your record, which means you finally have evidence of how much of your admin time these queues actually burn.

Where do the transcripts and answers live?

Structured call data, transcripts and tags sit on our Sydney servers, and live audio is processed offshore. We are transparent about that split. See the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the OAIC for the frameworks that apply.

Is this the same agent that answers our phone?

Same platform, opposite direction. Plenty of clients run both: inbound cover on the front line, and an outbound agent quietly clearing the hold-queue admin behind it. The warm transfer piece shows how the two hand off to your team.