This paper assesses the perceived listening quality of customer support waiting loops using both a subjective experiment as well as an objective perceptual assessment with POLQA (ITU-T Rec. P.863) and VISQOL. A modified version of the methodology defined in the ITU-T Rec. P.835 was derived and used in this paper to subjectively assess the listening speech quality, the listening audio quality as well as the overall listening quality of the waiting loop perceived by the user. It is expected that the perceived listening quality of the customer support waiting loop can influence the overall quality of the customer support communication service. The waiting loop consisted of a speech announcement and a music fragment. Both are assessed separately as well as overall. The results show that the degradations introduced by the investigated codecs and packet loss, representing typical degradations commonly seen in voice communication over telecommunication networks, seriously impact the subjectively perceived listening quality of the speech announcement and music fragment as well as the overall subjectively perceived listening quality of the waiting loop. As expected the listening quality of the music fragment is, in most of the cases, significantly lower than the listening speech quality of the announcement. The POLQA results show a high correlation between subjective and objective measurements for the listening speech and audio quality as well as the overall listening quality of the waiting loop. On the other hand, it is shown that the VISQOL model provides too low correlations between predicted objective and subjective scores for accurate prediction of the listening speech and audio quality as well as the overall listening quality of the waiting loop. © S. Hirzel Verlag · EAA.