[colimbarna]

Hold for me is pretty good. I've never used the phonetree feature, but I think it's often the case that I don't know which button I need to press: I have to listen to them all first, then decide which one. Commonly I have to listen to the tree twice: once to decide, and once to find out what to click. I'll probably look for the phonetree next time, so I can just read over it and find what I want. I agree it would be much better to preload it, but that might not be plausible due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.

[londons_explore]

> due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.

There are probably only ~10,000 phone trees that cover the vast majority of calls in the USA.

If a phone tree is seen by many users and is identical, there is probably no privacy reason not to publish it. Even moreso if the total number of digits typed in quick succession is < 4 (ie. user hasn't entered some password to get in). A human operator could be the final check.

[xur17]

I recently discovered that you can Google "{company} phone number", and in a number of cases it will offer to call, navigate the phone tree, wait on hold, and call you when a customer service agent is on the line. Delta, Allegiant, etc all seem to work.

[dogsledsleddog]

What does it do if the company is Google?