Show HN: Mantis is an embeddable business phone in the browser
mantis.chat
mantis.chat
More details:
I'm Seth, the creator of Mantis. In the spring, I (re-)launched roundtable.audio here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26856883), and decided shortly after to pivot to solve a more immediate business problem.
If you're anything like me, you hate live chat solutions as they exist currently, especially when automated. When possible, I always prefer to pick up the phone to have my questions answered quickly by a real human before making a buying decision. It's hard to believe that in 2021 the best we can do is put 10 digits on a website when we want to enable audio-based support.
As I was building this out, I realized it can also be a powerful tool outside of the typical sales and support contexts. Everyone knows it's important to talk to your customers when launching a new product or startup. As a founder, it's still possible to have these customer conversations yourself (doing things that don't scale - the YC gospel). Mantis can offer a customer interview hotline directly to your site. I plan to use Mantis to iterate on Mantis, so perhaps it can be useful to your tech-oriented product too. This re-surfacing of an HN post last week captures some sentiment around this idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28594313).
The core product is ready to go, and I'll be rolling it out slowly to start. If you're interested in trying it, add yourself to the waitlist on the landing page or email now@mantis.chat with your intended use case. There's so much cool stuff to build on top of this, and I'm excited to share more as I progress.
Come by and have a chat with me by clicking the black button in the bottom-right corner and clicking "Join Audio Call". I'm excited to hear what you think!
I would like to set up office hours where I can guarantee that I will be available to take calls. How doe Mantis handle that? What if I am on a long call and several people call in? Is there a way to transition from the call to a screen share if I have a way to show a customer how to solve their problem?
- Q: I would like to set up office hours where I can guarantee that I will be available to take calls. - A: Right now, you might have to publish on your website the time of such office hours. If this is something you and others would find useful, we can add a configuration option to allow you to state when you're typically online.
- Q: What if I am on a long call and several people call in? - A: We allow "concurrent" agents at the moment, meaning you can have multiple people answering calls so people don't have to wait in the queue. Another feature I'm thinking of adding in is a way to set a time limit per call. That is, when someone calls in and you answer, it will display a timer (say 3 minutes) that the user has. This seems like a not so rude way of preventing individuals from hogging all of your time.
- Q: Is there a way to transition from the call to a screen share if I have a way to show a customer how to solve their problem? - A: There is currently an "interactive canvas" feature where you can use a WYSIWYG editor to send live visual aids to the user. I think a screen-share feature is also very sensible and something I'll likely put on the feature roadmap.
Are you taking calls 24/7?
No, I'm certainly not available to take calls 24/7 right now. For a smaller scale business, it's certainly seems reasonable to only take calls during "normal business hours." That being said, during those hours when businesses are normally responsive to a live chat feature, Mantis is meant to provide a higher throughput medium to answer questions and solve issues faster than someone can via text.