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 :)
Agree with @Aak about a low hanging fruit target -- people calling Unemployment.
With the right messaging, I think you could get media interested in talking about your service, since it will alleviate a burden or frustration point of those who are unemployed.
You may need to use a tool like Cision to do media outreach.
Though I'm not a fan of Press Releases, you could also use something like PRWeb to test if a distributed press release would help get media attention.
Most of the places I call already have the call-back system implemented, but I'll definitely keep the service in mind. Good luck.
As soon as I read about your callback service I thought of the slew of stories I heard from various friends here in the States. With millions of unemployed suddenly hitting phone lines of unemployment agencies since March and staying on hold anywhere between 4 to 8+ hours this would have been a great tool for lines that got hit hard due to the disruption of COVID. How can users sing up/take advantage of this service? This could be beneficial for those needing to deal with government and health services for sure.