LucyPhone for Android is here y’all!

We have released the LucyPhone app for Android.  So give it a spin and let us know what you think.  If you have seen the iPhone app, you’ll notice that the experience is very similar to how the iPhone app works.  The added benefit of the Android app is the notification bar functionality.  Whenever you have a live call in progress, you will see a notification item in at the top of your Android screen.  Just pull that down to see what the current state of the call is.  Check out the screenshots!  

Find it in the market by searching “lucyphone” (no spaces)

Twitter for Customer Service — a match made in heaven?

 About six months ago, I tweeted about my frustration with Comcast when their digital migration left me without the channel lineup I previously had.  It was my first time trying out Twitter as a customer service tool, and I must say I was quite pleased with the results.  However, there are still plenty of reasons why Twitter alone is far from the perfect customer service tool — this goes for the customer as well as the company.

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Excitement abounds

Mike and I are headed to Miami for the International Contact Center Expo on Monday thru Wednesday next week.  We are really looking forward to not only showing off all the cool stuff we’ve been working on, but we are psyched to learn more about what’s on the minds of contact center leaders. 

Visitors to our booth will get a sneak peek at our Android app on my new Samsung Captivate.  Still some minor bugs we are working on cleaning up, but it’s close.  We will also be giving a demo of some of our more enterprisey stuff, collectively dubbed “LucyQ”.  We have some great ways of helping contact centers give their customers a better experience while at the same time helping them cut costs.  In an age where companies are talking about being “proactive” for their customers (think Nationwide commercials), we are just one way in which a company can do that.

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Lucy for Mobile is Live!

We have released the mobile version of our site to production!  You can now point your mobile browser to m.lucyphone.com.  Check it out!

Congrats ! Vlad is the big winner!

We just got off the phone with Vlad (@Vlad33141) from Miami who won our LucyPhone Summer Contest for saving the most time on single call using LucyPhone.  Vlad saved over 1 hour and 28 minutes when he called a phone system that handles Prison-related complaints.  Vlad makes regular calls to this system in support of his son.  With LucyPhone, no matter how long the wait, he can handle it, thanks to Lucy’s insatiable appetite for boring hold music and messages that say ‘Your Call is important to us’… 

Vlad will be meeting up with the LucyPhone team next month in Miami when we are there for the International Call Center Expo and he will be given his awesome Apple iPad.  Congrats Vlad!  Keep using LucyPhone to make those calls!

Testing Lucy for Mobile and SMS

We’re about to unveil some new ways of kicking off the Lucy experience.  Some of our users are going to help beta test the experience of the two new features:

1.  Ability to SMS to a short code to start a LucyPhone call.

2.  A version of the site that is very mobile-friendly (well, it’s more than mobile-friendly, it’s mobile-focused).

We are hoping to get some feedback as to how we can make the user experience better in each of these two areas.

Will let you know when we are going live with these new features…

Choosing a good problem

What a year it has been so far!  Just over 5 months ago, we launched LucyPhone as a public beta.  So much has happened since March.  We’ve been lucky to have been featured in a number of newspapers, TV and radio news outlets, and some pretty cool magazine publications.  We think this speaks to the fact that we chose a pretty good problem to solve.

We are also working with some neat companies to help alleviate their customer service demand issues, and we are doing it in pretty novel ways.

I remember right after we first built LucyPhone, we spent a fair amount of time on Twitter (we still do) responding to the people that were complaining about being on hold.  Here’s a good one.  We see ones like this all the time:

“Been on hold with @mediatemple for 35 minutes. Went from position 14 to position 11. Looks like I’ll be on hold for 2 hours at this rate.”

With the publicity/exposure we’ve been getting, we see that more and more people are thinking, “Hey, maybe I’ll let Lucy wait for me this time”.  But we still have work to do… there are still a lot of people tweeting about being on hold — perhaps they have not yet discovered the virtues of our dear Lucy?

Here is kind of tweet we love to see.  It really confirms why we set out to build LucyPhone in the first place:

More to follow …