Finally!—Help with Customer Service Calls

August 14, 2012

From this practical insight into the time-sucking, head-banging-inducing customer service call center world, the new Israeli high-tech company Zappix was born in 2010. The solution it offers is straightforward and could change the way we interact with call centers––without elevator music, annoying call robots, or hard-to-understand foreign accents.

Zappix shows users a visual map of the call center’s routing system. Instead of hearing “Press 1 to speak to a sales agent,” for instance, callers press numbers from a handy list of options and the call is routed accordingly. Available as a free application in the coming months in the United States, Zappix currently works in Israel with about 50 companies: insurance brokers, banks, mobile service providers, and even fast-food restaurants. Based in Rehovot, it has 70,000 Israeli users and nine employees.

Eventually Zappix intends to make money by offering its service to corporations looking for a new way to make customer service faster, better, and more cost-effective. American consumers, Zappix found, aren’t too happy with outsourced call centers and will drop a call if they can’t get the information they need quickly. With competition between businesses increasing, companies can’t afford dropped calls or unhappy customers.

Available as a free app on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, with later rollouts on a variety of computers and devices, Zappix lets the user customize the list of companies most often called. It “remembers” pathways and choices such as how to dial for latest flight times, where to order a pizza, or how to check a bank account balance without having to go through the entire menu again. [Note: Zappix Web site is currently only available in Hebrew.]

Source: Excerpts of an article by Karin Kloosterman, www.israel21c.org