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2 Comments

Never “wait on hold” for customer support again.

Hello Indie Hackers! My name is Julian and I hate "waiting for the next available agent". Last year I started my first business and found myself dealing with the CRA (that's Canada Revenue Agency for the non-Canadians amongst us) fairly often as we were learning some of the ropes in filing corporate taxes. Nearly every call was at least an hour on hold. I asked the CRA to implement a callback service. Needless to say they didn't, so I built youcallme (http://youcallme.io) to solve this problem for myself.

The way it works is you enter in the phone number you want to call on the web tool and you receive a phone call as soon as the next agent is available. If there is a pre-recorded menu system we do speech-to-text to display the options as text messages you can respond to over chat.

Behind the scenes our system is making the call on your behalf and waiting on hold until an agent comes available. We're able to detect when it's a human on the other line before calling you. We've tested this tool on hundreds of phone numbers and it seems to work quite well.

I feel like I have a new "hammer" in hand and it's been fun using it for other phone calls I (and my friends) have had to make recently (e.g. telehealth: 2+ hours on-hold during the COVID-19 outbreak; bell: 40+ min; and other customer support companies, etc).

I'm very keen on hearing if this is a frustration for others and esp. businesses who this may cost money (anecdote: my wife's work hired an intern to call our city's courthouse since wait times could be up to an entire day for the filing departments).

If you feel this service would be useful to you or just have thoughts on how I can make this a more useful tool, please share :)

posted to Icon for group Ideas and Validation
Ideas and Validation
on March 10, 2020
  1. 1

    Really good idea. I think the main obstacle is that most people don't make calls to support lines all the time so you will need to be known before they make the call otherwise they will just call it and suffer.

    There are definitely business cases for this where you can free up workers to do other things while waiting for the call.

  2. 1

    Hi, Great idea! There has to be a high demand for this. When an agent becomes available does your system ask them to wait while you connect with the caller? I assume if you lose an agent your system redials but goes to back of the queue? Best of luck!

  3. 1

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