
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.<p>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.<p>Our solution: We wanted to make it "one click" to reach a real person.<p>How it works: You click on who you want to talk to (even a specific department, like the billing dept at AT&#38;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.<p>Website version: http://www.fastcustomer.com (free)
iPhone: http://itunes.com/app/FastCustomer (99 cents)
Android: Know any great Android developers?  ;)<p>Technical: Rails + Twilio, hosted on Rackspace Cloud.<p>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.<p>Thanks for checking it out!
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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

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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.

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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.

~~~
qixxiq
I personally would be quite worried about it being used for prank calls. At
the click of a couple buttons anyone can create a very awkward conversation
between AT&T and a random stranger (or a friend).

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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?

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

~~~
bschlinker
Not too sure about that -- this would prevent phone reps from ending calls
when the connection with the customer isn't functioning properly (but yet the
line is still active).

~~~
erikpukinskis
Maybe it can be done with manager intervention.

~~~
bschlinker
If true, you could pretty easily take down a call center simply by calling up
and leaving the lines open with no caller. Managers would need to be running
all over the place.

Since call center employees commonly have the ability to perform call
transfers, I can only imagine they have the ability to hang up on calls.
Otherwise, I imagine they could simply transfer the call to an invalid
extension to "hangup".

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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.

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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.

~~~
jrockway
Yeah, I am sure you could. I could probably set up an Asterisk server that
would meet our needs in about a day.

What I've learned from working for a big company is that they only want to
save money if it makes their employees more miserable in some way. An example
is turning off the lights and heat at 6PM. This saves a few cents, and makes
anyone who wants to stay late miserable. A job well done.

With technology projects, though, the goal is to spend as much money as
possible. For an individual to make money, he needs to be promoted. To be
promoted, you have to have a big team. To have a big team, you have to have a
big project. So the incentive is to make small projects into big ones. The
easiest way to get a big project is to buy some Very Expensive software or
service, and then hire a team to "customize" it. This way, your line item at
the end of the year is at the top, so you must be Very Important and will get
promoted.

Also, conference calls already "save money" -- you can have the important
business people in the expensive financial centers, and you can have all the
programmer monkeys somewhere cheaper, and they can still communicate
effectively. (Not really, of course, but it looks good on paper.)

Anyway, this is a long way of saying, I doubt we will use your service any
time soon. Maybe if you make it cost _more_ than what we have now, which a
separate service like I originally described would :)

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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

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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.

~~~
jedsmith
Never noticed that. Strange that you can edit almost everything else.

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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.

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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!

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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

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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.

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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. :)

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

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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...](http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2007/01/calling-for-support-calling-for-
trouble-the-business-idea/)

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.

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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! :)

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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.
:)

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keeptrying
Great idea. I think a lot of companies would love to add this to their own
apps. You should start selling this to them ASAP.

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markjheadd
Fonolo has been offering this type of service for a while
(<http://fonolo.com>).

~~~
ekanes
Fonolo is pretty cool. There's another similar service called LucyPhone. I'd
say the main difference between those great services and ours is that with
them you still have to be on the phone, listening to prompts and pressing
buttons, and then they wait on hold for you.

With our service you just press a button and go back to your life.

~~~
extension
Eh? As far as I can tell, these services do everything yours does.

EDIT: actually, Lucy makes you do the phone menus yourself. But Fonolo crawls
the voice menus and generates a matching menu online (which is very slick, if
it works).

~~~
ekanes
I'm definitely a fan of both services, they're great. Our goal is just to take
it one step further, and do it all for you. Fonolo does have a beautiful
system with the menus, but they do call your phone for you to do the
navigating. You can try it out at <http://consumer.fonolo.com/>

~~~
rezanator
Fonolo is awesome! My company uses their business service and it handles user
input and waiting on hold too.

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supabill
Nice product, will be bookmarking and using in the future. I sent you a bug
report to your woodmill email, hopefully you got it. I agree that you need to
verify requests in some way, although my friends hopefully enjoyed talking to
at&t and verizon randomly just now, I certainly enjoyed them getting the calls
:)

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mwill
My ISP and phone provider iiNet (Based in Australia) do this. You call and
chose the broad department you want to talk to (tech, sales, or billing), and
you're told how long your wait is approximately, and asks if you want a
callback on the number you're calling from.

Speaking from personal experience using this sort of system: It's _fantastic_
to use and if you're successfully inserting yourself as the middleman in this
sort of experience you're definitely on the right track.

I can see this also being extremely useful for call out tech people who need
to jump on the phone to talk to their clients providers on regular occasion.

Great idea, if you expand to Australia it'll be a must have app for me.

~~~
ekanes
Thanks, Australia is high on our list when we get to more countries.

~~~
xelfer
Internode in Australia also do it, however they don't offer it to the caller
until you've been on hold for 8 minutes. An option at the start of the call
would be much better.

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jbeard
I like it - it's giving a URI to customer service reps. Might be useful to
provide a way for customers to create their own macros for services that you
do not support so that the list can be both corporate-curated and community-
driven.

------
pbhjpbhj
<http://www.fastcustomer.com> <http://itunes.com/app/FastCustomer>

<http://twilio.com>

Sorry if I missed them.

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socialhack23
The big companies like Amazon, etc already have this or could easily add it. I
think this would be more useful for the thousands of other smaller companies
out there. Perhaps you can wigitize this product and offer companies to place
it on their website. I can see the longtail working out better.

On the other end, as far as I know for something like Amazon, etc you need to
call in order to be put in the line for them to call you back. The cool thing
about your service is I don't need to call :)

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zmitri
This is an amazing idea. I would love to try it. Most of customer service
calls I make are with Verizon who are actually quite good, but I want to try
with airlines!

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jeffwidman
ekanes--Have you looked into setting these up like freeconferencecall.com
where it dead-ends the calls out of a rural area so you can collect subsidies?
(Not a fan of the legislation, but if it exists you can leverage it.)

Not sure how you'd do this using Twilio, but rather than routing the user
straight to the number, you could route the user to the rural number and then
place an outbound call from teh rural conference number and patch the two
together

~~~
ekanes
Interesting, thanks for the idea.

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dmazin
Has anyone else noticed that the California DMV actually has a service like
this? If you call them and and the hold time is more than 30 minutes, they
offer you the choice to hang up and be called when they are ready for you.
Who'd think that would come from the fucking DMV?

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extension
Would be totally rad if it could detect when any call is off hold. I bet
there's some magic DSP heuristic that could do it, maybe with some false
positives e.g. "your call is important to us..."

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dkokelley
So which is it? Do we spend 50 hours or 60 hours on hold? It looks like an
inconsistency on your home page marketing copy.

This looks like a great idea. I think it has great word of mouth potential.

~~~
ekanes
Thanks for the catch, fixing it now. We hope it has word of mouth potential
too!

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entrepreneurial
REALLY Cool! How is rackspace cloud hosting? Reliable?

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TheSmoke
Definitely a great service. Wish you guys luck!

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jhuckestein
Are you A/B testing already? I like how the heading subtitle changes on every
reload

~~~
baddox
More likely, they're just giving you a random subtitle each page load for fun
or as an easter egg.

~~~
ekanes
Yeah, we're just having fun there.

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aagha
Best thing since sliced bread.

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clistctrl
How do you tell the difference between hold music, and a representative?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Isn't it a lot harder to tell the difference between a real rep and an inline
hold message ... "your call is important to us"|"please have your customer
number ready". Or indeed the pre-contact message "this call is being recorded
[...]"

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huge_ness
you guys are awesome.

A few friends and I have been working on a similar project. You totally upped
us on it.

Great job :)

~~~
Cushman
Synchronicity. We were discussing implementing this exact product not two days
ago... decided against it since we couldn't beat Fonolo for free.

Glad someone else is solving this problem :)

