Seem Familiar..read this from yahoo front page today! Someone should contact the New York Times who wrote this article and inform them of Go800!!
An Escape Hatch From Being Stranded on Hold
Buzz up! 138 Print
On Monday June 28, 2010, 12:16 am EDT
IN a recent Consumer Reports survey about everyday annoyances, with 10 being “annoys you tremendously,” respondents rated the failure to get a human being on a customer service line an 8.6, second only to hidden fees (8.9) and more irritating than spam e-mail (7.5) and inaccurate meteorologists (4.3), which was at the bottom of the list.
A new company, LucyPhone, is offering a solution: when put on hold, users can hang up, and are then called back when a customer service representative finally picks up. On the free service’s Web site, LucyPhone.com, users type in a customer service number (or click on one of many stored on the site), as well as their own. The company also has submitted a free iPhone application to Apple, which it expects to be approved soon.
Founded by Mike Oristian, 36, and his brother Tom, 30, who live in Richmond, Va., LucyPhone has been available since March and been lauded on blogs like Lifehacker and The Consumerist. But LucyPhone still needs to raise its profile, and for that the high-tech, automated start-up is taking a high-tech, automated approach.
•
It has set up a real-time search of messages sent by Twitter users for phrases like “on hold with,” which are apt to be complaints about customer service. Through its own Twitter account, LucyPhone automatically signs up to follow those users, who, when they notice new followers, often click on their profiles out of curiosity.
On March 14, for instance, Dave Cirilli sent out a Twitter message that read, “Aaaaand that would be THREE HOURS on hold with 1-800-JETBLUE! Okay, @JetBlue, you beat me! You wore me down! I give. Goodnight.”
After later noticing that he was being followed by LucyPhone, Mr. Cirilli, who lives in New York, tried the service. (Then it came full circle: Mr. Cirilli, who it turns out is a partner at Giant Noise, a public relations agency with offices in New York and Austin, approached LucyPhone and was hired to promote the service.)
On LucyPhone.com, meanwhile, under the heading “Angst abounds on Twitter,” a stream of recent Twitter messages appears from frustrated customers. On June 25, for example, there was a message from Twitter user Meadloaf, who was “on hold with the IRS for 28 minutes, when they answered I got so excited that I fumbled the phone and hung up. Start over.”
•
LucyPhone is not the first company to offer relief to those agitated about being on hold, with one, Virtual Hold Technology, dating back to 1995. Virtual Hold’s so-called queuing technology allows customers to opt to be called back instead of waiting on hold, and it has been hired by companies including I.B.M., Aflac and Avon.
Southwest Airlines, which receives about 110,000 calls from customers daily, hired Virtual Hold for a queuing system it started in April 2009.
“We initiated this project because we realized that there are going to be times that unexpected increases in call volumes (e.g., sales or irregular operations) push customer demand slightly above our ability to answer calls in a time frame we’re comfortable with,” Ashley Dillon, a Southwest Airlines spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail message.
In the last eight months of 2009, according to Southwest Airlines, 45 percent of callers elected to be called back rather than wait on hold, allowing the airline to save 24.8 million minutes in calls to its toll-free number, a considerable saving.
“This is a wonderful option for our customers and our employees,” Ms. Dillon wrote. “We love it; our customers embrace it.”
Instead of being an “inside-out solution” that uses software within Southwest Airlines, LucyPhone uses an “outside-in solution,” which functions independently from the call center’s system, said Mike Oristian.
Still, LucyPhone requires cooperation from agents, who upon picking up a call hear a recorded message from LucyPhone telling them to press 1 to be connected with the awaiting customer, whose phone then rings. Call center employees are, oddly enough, accustomed to dealing only with live humans, and some hang up on the message.
“It’s definitely a challenge, but after we reach out to companies, they can go from hanging up on us 30 percent of the time to being complete LucyPhone fanatics and calling back 100 percent of the time,” said Tom Oristian. Over all, fewer than 10 percent of users are left hanging because the agent hangs up, according to LucyPhone.
•
And while the company uses Twitter as a carrot for new customers, it also uses it as a stick: LucyPhone users whose calls are dropped are encouraged to send a form Twitter message that scolds the company by name, which companies tend to notice because they monitor Twitter closely. One recent message, for example, read, “#PNCBank Don’t hang up on @lucyphone!”
The tightrope LucyPhone walks is that it harnesses consumer frustration with being on hold while it tries not to antagonize the offending companies. The way that LucyPhone aims to someday earn revenue is for those companies to pay to feature a LucyPhone widget on their own sites, so their customers can use it without leaving their sites.
Whether or not companies hire LucyPhone, they may find that operators who cooperate with them are rewarded with customers more apt to calmly state their issues than to take hostages.
“We’ve cooled their jets a little,” Tom Oristian said of LucyPhone customers. “These agents are delighted to have customers ready to talk about the problem at hand instead of ranting about how long they’ve been on hold.”
