Putting 'Hold' on HoldPutting 'Hold' on Hold

Cool new apps for the contact center are coming from small companies.

Remember the scene in "The Godfather" where Michael Corleone approaches Moe Green about buying out his casino, and the deeply offended Moe Green snaps, "I buy you out; you don't buy me out"? Well, if you've ever wanted to say to someone who puts you on hold, "I put you on hold; you don't put me on hold," now you can.Via GigaOm, here's a very cool iPhone app from Bandwidth.com. It lets you enter a star-code and hang up when you're put on hold, and the app generates a callback to you when the other side picks up.

This is another very cool app, in the vein of Fonolo's visual IVR tree, that can make the customer's contact center experience less frustrating--and indeed just offering the app is a way of showing you value the caller's time as much as they do, and you have no desire to keep them, as Debbie Harry sang, hangin' on the telephone, just so that they can listen to some canned pitch for your products or a Muzak version of "As Tears Go By."

It's also a sign that so much of the innovation in communications is happening with small companies, startups, firms that build one-off apps and sell them for cheap over public wireless networks, on platforms like the iPhone. Why aren't apps like this coming out as part of the big contact center platforms?

Debbie Harry (live, with some old-school '80s dance moves):

Moe Green:

Cool new apps for the contact center are coming from small companies.