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Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#52Just 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.
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.
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Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#53Just 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.
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.
Never noticed that. Strange that you can edit almost everything else.
Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#54ekanes--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
Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#55Nice 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 :)
Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#56I 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 somethi…
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…
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 :)
Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#57Do 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?
Also, a lot of phone service reps are literally not able to end a call. Often, the customer has to do it.
We seem to get a lot of hang-ups from customer service people. You wait 20 mins, to speak to them, you ask them something that's not going to be on their first script page, they ask you to wait and hang up. Or you wait for them and then need a few seconds to grab a pen "please hold" put them on hold for 10 seconds, retrieve the call and it's dead.
The other good one is cancelling a contract where they ask you to wait and simply keep your line open and don't let you make any calls for the next 20 mins ... always a joy. AFAIK there's no way on our phone system to force an incoming call to terminate.
Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#58How do you tell the difference between hold music, and a representative?
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 [...]"
Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#59Re: Show HN: "Never wait on hold again" service built with Rails and Twilio
#60And 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."