Email to Tim Cook prompted change of Apple's 'on hold' music quality

Since the days of Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executives have been famously open to customer suggestions, complaints and praise, often engaging with the public via work email accounts. As noted by TUAW, that tradition appears to carry on with current CEO Tim Cook.

According to one account shared on Reddit — in response to an earlier post on efforts taken by Apple's Maps team to correct erroneous address data — a customer was reportedly able to induce change in the quality of on hold music used by Apple's call center.

I once sent Tim an email about the quality of music while on hold with Apple. It was super low quality, therefore an upbeat rock song sounded like pure distortion and really aggravated me because I was on hold for 20+ minutes for something so simple (iPhone didn't turn on, needed to set up a repair as in my country no Apple Store = have to send it to another country).

Much to my surprise a lady from Cupertino called me up the next day, saying she'd received a concerning email from Tim about ugly distortion hold music while on the phone, that Tim had tested this himself and agreed that something had to be done. She assured me that the hold music would be tested to make sure it sounded pleasant on all types of phones and connections.

The next time I called Apple, the hold music was indeed very pleasant.

Cook is known to be just as open to criticism . During an interview with NBC's Brian Williams in 2012, Cook admitted he routinely receives hundreds of emails from customers every day.

"I get hundreds, and some days thousands of emails from customers. This is a privilege because they talk to you as if you're sitting at their kitchen table," Cook said at the time. "Because they care so deeply about Apple, they want to make a suggestion, or want to ask for help on something, or want to tell you how much they love the product."