Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio

[ekanes]

My buddy paulsingh and I have been working on this for a few weeks, got something up and running and wanted to show you.

The problem we're solving: When you need customer service (your flight got canceled, strange fees on your bill, etc) you just want to talk to a real person. Waiting on hold wastes your time AND your concentration; you can't be coding in the zone when part of your brain is waiting for an operator.

Our solution: We wanted to make it "one click" to reach a real person.

How it works: You click on who you want to talk to (even a specific department, like the billing dept at AT&T) and we take it from there. Our system dials in, presses whatever buttons need pressing and waits on hold for as long as it takes. Only when we have an actual operator on the line do we call you.

Website version: http://www.fastcustomer.com (free) iPhone: http://itunes.com/app/FastCustomer (99 cents) Android: Know any great Android developers? ;)

Technical: Rails + Twilio, hosted on Rackspace Cloud.

We'd LOVE your feedback, and if any HNers want to review it let me know and I'll send you a promo code. If there are any companies you call regularly that we don't have (we're closing in on 1000 of the most-called companies) just say the word and we'll add 'em. Also, if you can think of things to do with our API we'd love to talk to you.

Thanks for checking it out!

[patio11]

And if you were a forward thinking megacorp, you could build something like this yourself. "Hiya, this is Paypal. Hit 1 to talk to ... Thanks. Type in your last four digits of your... Thanks Mr. McKenzie. Would you prefer to hold while waiting for a representative, or should we call you back in approximately 15 minutes? Hit 1 to..."

15 minutes later.

"Hello, is this Mr. McKenzie? Hiya, this is Steve at Paypal and I have your account brought up. What can I help you with today?"

I think that's far, far cheaper than $100k in dev costs and, if a 6 week test eliminates 5% of your CS spend while bringing your hold times down by 50%, that's like a career-making win. (Seriously guys: Twilio is the startup to watch. I say this while I'm literally wearing their sweatshirt but trust me, they're going to be massive.)

P.S. After you have it, you can trivially wire it into click-to-call on your webapp. "We can't show you that transaction, due to routine procedures meant to protect your account. Click here and type in your phone number, and we will have our Security Team contact you in the next five minutes. Thanks for using Paypal."

[vyrotek]

There are many SaaS companies which provide Call Center systems with the call back feature. It works just as you described. You call in and it asks for you phone number and calls you back when an agent is available. It even tells you your position in line if you call back too early.

http://www.incontact.com & http://www.liveops.com for those interested

[ekanes]

Absolutely. There are a few startups doing this, ranging from hardware that companies install to software to "outside in" solutions like we're working on. As far as I understand this industry, the challenge is that they've all got massively complex dedicated IVR systems, and changing them is hard.

Some solutions will detect when call volumes are high, and allow you to put in your phone number to be called back. That's pretty cool, but you still have to call in, press buttons and wait to see if you get that message.

I agree though, in principle it's an area where companies could innovate. Unfortunately, customer service is typically approached as a cost to be minimized rather than an opportunity to be maximized. Zappos is the exception, etc.

[sudoscience]

Amazon does it and has for a couple years.

[k33n]

Delta Skymiles customer support has been doing this for awhile now.

[zeteo]

Interesting, but this doesn't address the fundamental problem. The main reason that companies make you wait on the line is to differentiate the customers who care a lot about their problem from those who don't. By making the cost of waiting, for the customer, practically negligible, you are sidestepping this protection mechanism; your success would flood companies with less important support calls, thus giving them a powerful incentive to shut you out. At first, they'll just instruct their customer service representatives to immediately hang up on anything that sounds like your service. Next they'll ask the legal department for ammo, and do their best to implement technical counter-measures.

It's an interesting idea, but it's IMHO doomed long term, unless you find a way to take the companies' interest into account as well. For instance, in order to maintain the same system of customer disincentives you should probably charge per each minute your service is used.

[citricsquid]

curious how you intend to handle abuse? Maybe have an sms sent to the recipient first and they must confirm? I was just able to enter the example number ("555-555-5555") and it seems to process just fine (currently "Status: Operator on the line! Trying to connect you...") even though I clearly don't own that number. I could cause problems for both customer service people and cellphone users with this. I'm assuming you don't do any of this based on the video though, I'm unable to test as I'm in the UK.

Excellent idea!

[ekanes]

Great question. There are a few ways we could handle it, but in principle we want to see how the problem happens before solving it. A confirmation process is a great idea but adds friction, and as we roll out we don't want to discourage usage. Basically, we want to see what happens so we don't optimize or problem-solve too early.

[baddox]

Do you play an automated message when the tech comes on the phone? How many phone service technicians will actually sit there and wait to be connected to the actual user?

[ekanes]

Yep. Most customer service folks don't mind waiting (they hear a phone ringing while we get you on the line) and they end up talking to happier customers, who are also much less likely to switch to another company than someone who's just been sitting on hold for 20 mins.

[mcantor]

Also, a lot of phone service reps are literally not able to end a call. Often, the customer has to do it.

[ajju]

Love it. Twilio is a great platform. An idea: if you want to have the customer service rep doing productive work while he waits you can have the user type in a message with their information (account number / name / address) in a text field and read it out to the rep before telling them to wait.

It would probably make sense to do this only for paid customers in the future so that people don't abuse the feature (and CS reps).

Facebooked.

[jrockway]

I need this for conference calls. Normally, I dial in at the time the meeting is supposed to start, but nobody else comes for ten minutes. This means I have to sit around and listen to the "nobody has joined yet" music, which sucks.

A system where the system calls you when everyone has indicated availability would be much nicer. No wasted time dialing in.

And BTW, these conference call services typically cost something like 30 cents a minute times the number of participants. So if your product eliminated 30 wasted seconds of airtime per employee per day, you would save a company like mine 12 million dollars a year.

[Simon_M]

Founder of a conference call start-up here.

This wouldn't work for conf call services as you'd still be charged from the moment a call was connected on your particular 'room' irrespective of who actually called it. Although it would certainly save time and you wouldn't have to listen to the annoying hold music.

Oh, and if you organisation is really paying 30 cents per minute, then you should get in touch as we could save them well over 12 million dollars a year! ;)

Regarding the dial-out when everyone's ready service... we're working on it.

[paulsingh]

This definitely sounds like a cool idea -- I'm adding it to my "have to do this sometime" list right now. :)

[mcantor]

Out of curiosity, how does your app know when a real human gets on the line...? Do you have a database of the automatic messages ("Please stay on the line while we sip Cognac and chortle") for each company so it doesn't get false positives?

[ekanes]

Indeed, we split test Cognac vs other drinks as an indicator of the psychographic profile of operators at various companies. Groupon is all about the rum and cokes, whatever that means.

Kidding! Yeah we play a message so the operators can hit 1 to get their next call.

[ohashi]

http://www.fastcustomer.com clickable link

[fuzzmeister]

Did you build the database of phone tree options yourself, or is there another place you're getting it from? Building such a database seems ridiculously time consuming.

[ekanes]

We originally looked at GetHuman, who really pioneered this space a long time ago. Their database is copyright so we would have needed permission, but one downside to crowdsourced data is that sometimes the crowd doesn't come back through and clean it. The result is that you have (for example) 9 different numbers to reach customer service, but what you really wanted was the best number. In the end we just did it from scratch.

[capstone]

Just bought your app for my IPhone. One comment: the app is not searchable on Fast Customer, only on FastCustomer (no space). If you just added Fast Customer to your description, it would be searchable.

[paulsingh]

Thanks for the heads up. Apple won't let me edit the keywords until we submit an update (which, actually, is coming soon)... I'll definitely get this fixed on the next release.

[jiffylu]

Your monetization strategy should be... if you're calling at&t about a service issue, verizon could pay to be notified with the opportunity to respond to the call first and win your business.

[evgeny0]

Love it! To take it further, AT&T could choose to pay more to NOT have Verizon notified.

[jvinet]

Brilliant. You've probably added a few years to my life, both in terms of hours lost and frustration listening to the same 24kbps top-40 song over and over.

Thanks. :)

[paulsingh]

best. comment. ever. :)

seriously, thanks!

[jmilloy]

You can tell what song is playing?!

[failquicker]

Aaron and Paul,

You guys weren't joking when you said you were moving fast. Looks great. I'm kicking the tires now and will report back. As I told you in January, great damn idea. Let's grab a beer -Jason

[snack]

This is a great idea. Make sure you have the British Tax Offices on this list ;) Racked up a huge bill this month.

[ekanes]

Right now we're just USA and Canada, but we want to add more countries ASAP. I've added the British Tax Offices to the list though for when we roll out in the UK! Thanks for the feedback.

[andrewheins]

What an awesome idea. First of all, thanks for building this. Like others have said, you've probably added years to our lives.

As a novel bonus, it'd be neat if you could wire up a twitter account that did song recognition and status updates.

Currently holding to: "Michelle Branch - Everywhere" for the 472nd time!

[qixxiq]

I'm interested to know what you plan on doing for revenue. I'm sure the cost of the calls will quickly outweigh the $.70 you're getting out of the app store.

Other than that its a great idea which I'm certain people would be willing to pay for (I would be if it was available internationally)

[paulsingh]

We're still figuring all that out -- for now, we just wanted to focus on making something that people want (ie, use).

Beyond that, we've got a couple of ideas that we'll be testing out -- maybe selling a brandable widget-based version to businesses, affiliate links, etc.

Not sure what will end up working but I can assure you that we'll be iterating pretty quickly. :)

[zippykid]

I've used this service a couple of times, and everytime I don't have to wait on hold, I smile.

[arafalov]

Glad you are having a go at it. I had some thoughts around that space a while ago: http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2007/01/calling-for-support-ca...

Point 6 there is similar to what you are trying to do.

Never did it, never will, but I do have a much longer document with additional idea directions and monetization strategies.

If you like and agree with the article, feel free to ping me and we can chat about the rest of the unreleased ideas. Like I said, I would be just happy for somebody to incorporate them.

Regards, Alexandre Rafalovitch

[ekanes]

Great ideas Alexandre, I'd love to talk.

[tmayshark]

This is a great service, and if I was in a position where I had to deal with phone trees regularily for my job, then I'd even be willing to pay something for it.

One minor gripe -- at least in Chrome, if you type something in ("Verizon") and hit enter without selecting any of the auto-complete options presented, you just get a generic "whoops, something went wrong". Ideally, just pop the user through a screen that lets them select from a list of possible matches.

I'd make a snarky comment about how the site doesn't render properly in IE 5.5, but I think I'm about 2 years late on that trolly.

[paulsingh]

Ah, sorry about that - I'm working on cleaning things up as we speak. We hammered out the MVP pretty quickly and have been hustling to make the service more reliable, scaleable, etc.

Polish coming soon, promise! :)

[gawker]

Great idea guys!

Just curious, what happens when someone finally picks up and hears nothing? Is there a possibility that the other line will hang up before you have a chance to call us?

[paulsingh]

So, there's definitely the possibility that you might pick up and hear nothing (maybe the operator hung up, we got a bad connection, etc)... but we've got a bunch of stuff working in the background to "gracefully" recover from that scenario. Regardless, we're going to get you an operator one way or the other. :)