Tired of Waiting On Hold? This Startup Will Do It For You

Automated operators, bad music and long wait times have never really screamed “excellent customer service,” but few companies have offered alternatives. Now a startup is offering one for them.

FastCustomer is a browser and iPhone app that allows customers to skip both the phone tree and the hold time when contacting customer service departments. Users simply choose who they would like to contact from a list of companies and tell FastCustomer where to reach them when a human is ready to chat.

The startup differs from its closest competitor, LucyPhone, in that it deals with phone tree options on its own. LucyPhone asks customers to select the appropriate options before freeing them from the phone while the service waits on hold in their places. With FastCustomer, the first time the customer picks up the phone it is to speak with a human.

To accomplish this, FastCustomer co-founder Aaron Dragushan personally spent days on hold with about 1,000 different companies. He learned the optimal path to a human operator on each customer service line, and programed FastCustomer to choose those options.

The downside to this strategy is that if a company changes its system, Dragushan needs to change his system. The upside is that FastCustomer can often navigate more quickly than a customer.

“We may get to an operator faster than if you press the buttons yourself, or try to figure it out, or try to wait on hold, Dragushan says. “Because we optimize how fast we can get to an operator.”

When the operator does pick up, the computer asks the operator to dial 1 to be connected to the customer. At that point, the FastCustomer’s phone rings. The company’s computers have waited on hold for 44,447 minutes since it launched about a month ago.

Dragushan is currently routing customer service calls for free, aside from a one-time $.99 cost for the iPhone app. Eventually, he hopes to be compensated by advertisers looking to target ads at people on hold with specific companies or by companies who purchase white-label versions of the service.

“People spend a lot of time on hold every year. Hours and hours,” he says. “If we can give them that time back, it could be worth a lot to them.”