
Announcing CEO Office Hours - mattjung
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1973-announcing-ceo-office-hours
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markbao
Hmm. 37signals is in an interesting position that offering phone chats is
actually a _feature_ not a bugfix. Although the point is to ask the CEO stuff
about 37signals, there's a big perspective factor going on here.

At my startup, Ramamia, we've always been offering phone support 24/7. Through
our mobiles. It doesn't matter that half of our userbase is in India and the
optimal time for them is snoozing time for us (well, okay, snoozing time for
my co-founder, seeing that it is 4am and I'm writing this), but I always felt
it would help our sales conversions.

Interestingly, 37signals posted about why they didn't offer phone _support_
last year: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1161-why-would-you-want-to-
ca...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1161-why-would-you-want-to-call-me)

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streety
I could imagine that getting very intense. I would be interested to know
roughly how many calls you receive. Do you use your personal mobile or do you
have a dedicated number?

Although I like the idea of the personal touch and always being there for your
customers I'm not sure I could, or would want, to be available 24/7. If I ever
get the prototype out the door I had considered using twilio to set up a call
system. The idea being it could go straight to voicemail when I really want to
sleep. Do you just turn your mobiles off during the night?

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markbao
Fortunately, we're still in beta (here comes the buzzword heckling) so call
volume isn't bad. My number is being funneled through Google Voice to my
personal mobile, so I can send it straight to voicemail configured on certain
hours, but I don't sleep much anyway.

I looked into Twilio too and tried them out. Their recording and text-to-
speech system is really cool. I looked into using <http://grasshopper.com>
which is what 37signals is using, and a more automated solution.

> _Although I like the idea of the personal touch and always being there for
> your customers_

I think we too have a special case going on here. Ramamia helps people share
photos, videos, and whatnot within their family, so that personal touch might
tip the scale when it comes to conversions. It can't hurt for conversions, but
it might get really hard to keep up with, but at that point, it's like a
server crashing under traffic: a blessing in disguise.

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megamark16
Reminds me of that article from a while back about how someone increased their
sales by XX% by putting their phone number on their website. I couldn't find
the article but it stood out to me at the time as making a lot of sense. A few
years ago my boss asked me to look into pricing some support chat software and
while there were a lot of companies offering said software it was really
difficult to get in touch with anyone.

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cobrien
The UserScape people did a brief post on this earlier in the year:

[http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/how_to...](http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/how_to_sell_more_software_by_adding_12_characters_to_your_homepage/)

~~~
solutionyogi
Minor correction, UserScape is a one man army, Ian Landsman.

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davidw
Sounds like a bit of a gimmick to me. Why would I want to talk to him? If I
have a problem and need phone support, this isn't going to cut it obviously,
nor is it intended as such. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how it works
out in practice; maybe it will prove useful for some purpose that was
difficult to foresee.

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mattjung
A simple yet inspiring idea...

