October 2008 Archives

Reading today of Bigpond's plan to add an IVR in front of their tech support gave me the following business idea: What if, instead of having to wrestle with IVRs and/or wait on hold for customer service, you could have someone (or something) else do that for you and call you when they've reached a human?

There are two things I'm aware of that sort of do this today:

1. Callback - some call centres allow you to leave a number so they can call you back when an operator is free, rather than have you wait on the line. This is a great feature and I'm not sure why more places don't do this.


2. Gethuman - a listing of many IVRs, mainly in the US/Canada and what sequence of buttons you should press to get a human; note that it isn't so helpful for IVRs that require voice input

On Hold thanks to FLC

Building a system to fully automate this would not be so hard. You could work off a prioritised list of the most frequently used call centres - e.g. big banks, utilities, subscription services (PayTV etc), telcos, ISPs and so forth - experience shows its mainly larger companies that bother with IVRs, and implement them in the most annoying way possible so there's not that large a list. Work down each company working out the shortest path to a human, whether that's through voice input or PSTN tones, then simply record those.

Now the customer calls you (this needs some thought), you log their number using caller ID or through manual input from them and the call ends. Your service dials the customer support line, plays back your recorded sequence, and upon detecting a human voice you play a "excuse me the kettle's boiling" and dial the customer back, connecting them to the customer service rep.

I don't have a super elegant solution for the initial customer contact. One option is to outsource that to your own overseas callcentre who understand enough to know that the customer wants to contact "Bigpond" or "Telstra", or "NAB" or "Commonwealth Bank". Alternatively you could have a different phone number for each and move the mapping problem to the end user, or, (oh the shame), your own IVR with a selectable list. :)

The business model for this would basically be user pays. Given that automating this is entirely feasible I think a flat fee model is simple and works best. Maybe use a premium in-bound 1900 or SMS which bills the user $2-5 or something equally small - given the basically zero marginal cost of service I think going for a smaller price makes sense - it makes it cheap enough for anyone who becomes aware of the service to give it a try since its not much to lose, and a helluva lot better than sitting on hold for 20 minutes.

So a little over a year after I saw a cyclist mown down by a 4WD I saw a girl get run over at a pedestrian crossing. Seriously, Sydney-siders, I know you're all busy people with your large mortgages, fancy houses and designer clothes, but SLOW THE FUCK DOWN AND PAY ATTENTION.

I was walking home along Harbord Road and I see a girl pause at the crossing waiting for the oncoming car to slow down - which it did, it stopped. So she starts walking across, breaking into a run, I guess she's thinking at this point that everyone's going to stop. Oncoming car in the other direction slams into her - I barely heard the screech of brakes - and she bounces off the windscreen onto the road. Given that a car on the other side of the road had already stopped for this girl, how the hell did the driver coming in the other direction not notice that traffic was stopped and a girl wearing a bright red top is crossing?

Its really such a sad thing to see for all involved. The driver was shocked as hell as you would be, and needlessly so. Slow down, pay attention, you're steering over a tonne of metal on the road - it does bad things when you hit squishy bodied people. Fortunately, the girl appeared to be as ok as one can be after being hit by a car - fully conscious and no visible injuries though she was sore. I called an ambulance which arrived after about 5 minutes and they stretchered her off.

One of my biggest bugbears about Sydney life lately is the failure of drivers to stop at pedestrian crossings. As a pedestrian I've stopped at the side of the road and looked oncoming drivers in the eye thinking they would stop, only to have them drive straight through and in some cases speed up! I've been trying to think of a way to penalise these drivers without causing a major accident but so far have not come up with anything workable. The latter point is really critical - sure I could throw shit at their car but if that causes them to swerve to avoid being hit it may well result in a much larger accident, something I have no desire to cause. I wish there was a way to report the license plates of such cars but the flipside is how would you stop people abusing such a system to report drivers they dislike for any reason?