Announcing CEO Office Hours | Hacker News Reader

Announcing CEO Office Hours

37signals.com

41 pointsmattjung9 comments

Hmm. 37signals is in an interesting position that offering phone chats is actually a feature not a bugfix. Although the point is to ask the CEO stuff about 37signals, there's a big perspective factor going on here.

At my startup, Ramamia, we've always been offering phone support 24/7. Through our mobiles. It doesn't matter that half of our userbase is in India and the optimal time for them is snoozing time for us (well, okay, snoozing time for my co-founder, seeing that it is 4am and I'm writing this), but I always felt it would help our sales conversions.

Interestingly, 37signals posted about why they didn't offer phone support last year: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1161-why-would-you-want-to-ca...

I could imagine that getting very intense. I would be interested to know roughly how many calls you receive. Do you use your personal mobile or do you have a dedicated number?

Although I like the idea of the personal touch and always being there for your customers I'm not sure I could, or would want, to be available 24/7. If I ever get the prototype out the door I had considered using twilio to set up a call system. The idea being it could go straight to voicemail when I really want to sleep. Do you just turn your mobiles off during the night?

Fortunately, we're still in beta (here comes the buzzword heckling) so call volume isn't bad. My number is being funneled through Google Voice to my personal mobile, so I can send it straight to voicemail configured on certain hours, but I don't sleep much anyway.

I looked into Twilio too and tried them out. Their recording and text-to-speech system is really cool. I looked into using http://grasshopper.com which is what 37signals is using, and a more automated solution.

> Although I like the idea of the personal touch and always being there for your customers

I think we too have a special case going on here. Ramamia helps people share photos, videos, and whatnot within their family, so that personal touch might tip the scale when it comes to conversions. It can't hurt for conversions, but it might get really hard to keep up with, but at that point, it's like a server crashing under traffic: a blessing in disguise.

Reminds me of that article from a while back about how someone increased their sales by XX% by putting their phone number on their website. I couldn't find the article but it stood out to me at the time as making a lot of sense. A few years ago my boss asked me to look into pricing some support chat software and while there were a lot of companies offering said software it was really difficult to get in touch with anyone.

The UserScape people did a brief post on this earlier in the year:

http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/how_to...

Minor correction, UserScape is a one man army, Ian Landsman.

That's the one I was thinking of. Thanks for finding it!

Sounds like a bit of a gimmick to me. Why would I want to talk to him? If I have a problem and need phone support, this isn't going to cut it obviously, nor is it intended as such. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how it works out in practice; maybe it will prove useful for some purpose that was difficult to foresee.

A simple yet inspiring idea...

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