YouCallMe

Hi PH, it's an honour to be able to share this work with you all! 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 started building 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. So far I've tried my prototype on a few numbers, e.g. telehealth: 2+ hours on-hold during the COVID-19 outbreak; bell: 40+ min; and other customer support companies. 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). Thanks!