The Problem: One of life’s great injustices is that companies make us navigate complicated and highly annoying phone trees, sometimes for hours. Then, when a company calls you, they expect an immediate response. With companies adopting automated customer service at a quickening pace, this system will remain frustrating until supercomputers develop empathy along with intelligence.
The Product: Introducing… “Hold Please”. A lot like the original Grand Central (now Google Voice), for just $10 a month you get a new phone number which you can give out as your “number” to service providers, Comcast, political campaigns, collection agents, creeps in the club, et. al..
When a company calls you, they get a taste of their own medicine:
Hold Please: “Please press 1 if you are a telemarketer. Press 2 if you are looking for money. Press 3 if we met while drunk the other night. Press 4 if I could already be a winner… Your approximate wait time is 70 minutes.”
…Wait there’s more: Additional features include
call queuing - You give the service your calendar and the hold time is based on when you are next free
call scheduling - If both parties are using “Hold Please”
human operators - To manage small tasks rather than bothering you
a spam option - The service learns which callers are especially annoying and blocks them for all users of “Hold Please”
Implementation: This service would be a snap to setup with the Twilio API:
<Response>
<Say>Twilio can speak text this easily.</Say>
<Say voice=“man”>It can sound like a man.</Say>
<Say voice=“woman” language=“en-gb”>Or a lady with a British accent.</Say>
<Say language=“es”>O en espanol.</Say></Response>
Idea credit: Sam Lessin