A new Internet service is bringing hope to people who get frustrated waiting for customer service on the phone.
According to Steph Hay with
Fast Customer, "We built a way with a single tap of a button, we route the call into the appropriate department and once we reach an agent, we ring back the customer's phone."
We searched through Fast Customer's list of 3,000 companies and picked several that we knew handled a lot of customers and a lot of calls like Time Warner, Citibank, Verizon and AT&T.
We put in our number, set a timer and waited to see if the estimated call back time was the actual call back time.
Several companies do offer a call-back service to avoid wait times.
But with Fast Customer, you don't even have to make the call in the first place.
"So you don't have to call customer service; you don't have to punch numbers, navigate any phone trees, you just talk to the human when the human's ready," said Hay.
Verizon, AT&T and Citibank took less than four minutes for the call-back, as promised on the site.
Time Warner - well, they weren't so timely.
We hung up after waiting more than 28 minutes - which was not the estimated wait time.
We tried again, this time waiting 19 minutes before giving up.
Hay said, "Customer service today tends to come with this feeling that it's [going to] be a painful process, so we're removing that pain entirely."
We're not sure who caused the pain in that experience, but three times out of four, our calls came on time.
As far as we're concernced, Fast Customer gets a ringing endorsement!
