Ask HN: What's wrong with the idea of my website?

1 points by pankratiev 14 years ago | 3 comments

You can put on your website/blog our widget and visitors will be able to send a voice message to you. People love talk, not type on keyboard. It's very easy for visitor to send a message to you.

We believe that it's a good tool when you need to show your customers/visitors/readers that their feedback is important. But probably we are wrong and it's just a crap.

What do you think? Could you please give your feedback about it?

Website: http://www.speakpipe.com/

Thanks

helen842000 14 years ago |

People don't get straight to the point when talking. At least with typing it's a structured way to list important details.

Customer service agents will have to listen to the call, make notes, then message the customer back. It's far more effective to have a written message in front of you when addressing someones concerns.

Also, it would be hard to manage, store and search through audio messages. It would make looking after the admin side of it very tedious.

While this idea seems to give a more personal touch to website customer service I think it would be very time consuming to provide a high level of customer support.

It's not a system that would scale to businesses receiving a high volume of technical enquiries.

I'd rather send/receive written messages if it means my question gets answered faster.

steventruong 14 years ago |

batista already covered most of what I wanted to say but I'll repeat some of it anyway for emphasis...

1. I take it you're assuming people love to talk over typing on a keyboard, given there was no evidence provided that suggests otherwise. I disagree.

2. Not every computer is equipped with a mic and even if they're cheap, its still a barrier.

3. This is personal opinion but I absolute hate leaving voice messages and getting voice responses compared to reading and writing. It is much FASTER with text than speech.

batista 14 years ago |

"You can put on your website/blog our widget and visitors will be able to send a voice message to you. People love talk, not type on keyboard. "

1) People browsing the internet already love to type on the keyboard. I don't see any shortage of text comments / messages. People writing their comments is the main staple of blogs, or Facebook and of Twitter.

2) Regarding the above, consider that blogs are textual in the first place, i.e the customer is there reading, not listening to someone. So why would he respond with voice?

3) People don't like leaving voice messages to people they don't know and expose their voice etc.

4) "Very easy" it is not. The huge masses without a Mac, don't usually have a built-in microphone on their computer. They would have to connect one to leave a message (and/or check their audio settings).

5) Has any "website/blog widget" ever gained any success in the market? With the possible exception of Disqus, and that is IF they make any money yet. I'm not sure "widgets" are a good business idea in the first place.

6) People also cannot leave a voice message while browsing a site from their work (which most people do most of their browsing from), because their boss/colleagues will hear them.

7) People might like talking in general, but that is to other people. Nobody likes leaving a message to an answering machine, which is what your service basically amounts to.