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A new program which aired last night on Channel 4 called Richard Wilson On Hold showcased the annoying rise of automated services which gets people all over the country fuming.

The program is based on a poll which suggested that more than half of Britons found ‘Utility' (55%) and ‘Telecomm' (51%) company automated phone systems the most annoying.

The actor Richard Wilson investigated the rise of automated services across Britain, including supermarket checkout queues, bagging areas in airports and automated phone services. He also puts the machines to the test to find out who's really benefiting from this kind of technology rather than hiring staff to conduct the service.

In the program, which was on Channel 4 at 9pm last night, Richard Wilson also creates his own call centre in an effort to reveal the worst and the best of companies when it comes to phone services.

In his experiment, which lasted over three days, the call centre made 400 calls - 50 calls to Barclays, E.on, Halifax, Santander, Sky, Southern Electric, and also to Virgin.

In his study he found that E.on had the longest call waiting time, at a shocking 58 minutes 17 seconds kept on hold. From his study, energy companies fared the worst. Southern Electric kept one person waiting for half an hour, with an average wait time of 6 minutes 4 seconds.

The shortest call was seen when contacting Sky, where the caller only had to wait 25 seconds for their call to be answered.

With the program saying that customer service is poorer than ever before, due to the higher rise in automated services, it is clear that businesses should rate customer service highly and encourage real staff onto their phones rather than leaving it to technology, which doesn’t always offer customers the best experience.

The program can be caught on catch up services and on the Internet over the next week.