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

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!

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

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

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..."

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!