Taking the torment out of customer helpline calls

Photo credit: CWCS Managed Hosting.

There are few things more annoying than calling a customer service hotline, navigating through a bunch of confusing options, and listening to dreadful music before finally connecting with an agent at the other end.

Sometimes you’ll find that you’ve connected with the wrong person – in your haste to reach a friendly voice you punched the wrong numbers. Then the wait starts all over again.

Trying to solve this problem is Hong Kong-based Skipmenu. The startup, which emerged from private beta mode recently, offers a visual customer service menu on its app.

The menu magically appears.

Users are able to see all the options directly on their screens and don’t have to wait for a robotic voice on the other end of the line to spell it out for them. By navigating through the options visually, they’re able to connect with a human in a couple of minutes.

Gabriel Chan, founder and CEO of Skipmenu, says the startup has support for more than 800 hotlines in Hong Kong. Its clients include HSBC, Bank of China, Standard Chartered, Cathay Pacific, China Mobile, and the Inland Revenue Department (IRD).

Numbers in the cloud

For Android users, the menu magically appears when a user dials the number for helpline support. There’s no need to open the app. Gabriel says the team is working on a similar process for iOS, but are currently inhibited from doing so because of Apple’s tight restrictions on third-party apps.

Time spent navigating through the visual menu is not considered to be part of a regular phone call and does not get charged to the customer. The actual call only starts after a user selects options and identifies the problem.

Call centers are a huge industry, worth an estimated US$300 billion each year, so there are quite a few other startups doing the same thing – such as Pakistan-based Vivid.

“Skipmenu is a vaccination against stupid telephone menus wasting your time. You never know when you need to call an automated phone menu, and you’d be glad you had Skipmenu when you hit one. And it costs less than the size of four photos on your phone… or a really huge photo,” explains Gabriel.

Gabriel adds that the app also has an extensive internal phone book that contains secret numbers not found publicly, such as the accounting department at IRD. The team has also incorporated an element of crowdsourcing – users can submit numbers to be included in the app as well.