If good things come to those who wait, Stephanie Hay isn’t interested.
She’s found a way around lengthy telephone hold times entirely: Fast Customer, a mobile and Web app she and two co-creators released last year.
“A human should never have to wait on the phone with a computer,” said Hay, a freelance consultant who lives in Alexandria.
With Fast Customer’s free service, users can bypass hold times for more than 3,000 companies, including Verizon, Aetna and Bloomingdale’s.
Users simply log into Fast Customer’s Web site or app, type in their phone number and press submit — at which point Fast Customer takes over and routes a call to the third party’s customer service line.
When a customer service representative becomes available, the user’s phone rings.
“When you tap a button and AT&T is on the other line, it’s magical,” Hay, 32, said, adding that most call-backs happen within 15 minutes. “I haven’t waited on hold in more than a year.”
A counter on the company’s site claims it has saved users 1.2 million minutes on hold — roughly the equivalent of 27 months.
Nicolette Pizzitola, chief executive of Compass Point Associates, a professional coaching and consulting firm in Chevy Chase, uses the app and said she appreciates the convenience.
“Wait-time, Muzak, static — that pain is very widely-felt,” she said.
Aaron Dragushan got the idea for Fast Customer while he was on hold with Comcast in late 2010.
“I just thought, ‘This is crazy,’ ” Dragushan said. “Why don’t we have our computer talk with their computer? Once everyone’s ready to talk, we’ll connect the humans.”
It took about two weeks for Dragushan and his business partner Paul Singh to come up with a prototype.
They got together at a Panera Bread in Arlington to try it out. Their first call was to AT&T.
“When my phone rang, we just about fell off our chairs,” Dragushan said.
Fast Customer, then priced at 99 cents, hit the Apple app store in March 2011.
At first, there were just a few downloads a day. But a month later, the online magazine Mashable wrote about the service. Thousands purchased the app in one day, and Fast Customer made it to Apple’s list of top downloads.
“That’s when we really hit it big,” Dragushan said. “And it just kept going from there.”
A few months later, though, demand began to plateau. Dragushan and Hay decided to offer the app for free.
Their plan worked: Twenty-five thousand people downloaded Fast Customer in two days.
“Our priority became to reach as many people as we could,” Dragushan said. “We wanted our business to grow as much as possible.”
The company is still playing around with its pricing structure. It plans to release a Fast Customer Pro app for $4.99 in coming weeks that would allow users to have a say in which companies are added to the service.
Dragushan invested $50,000 of his own money to get Fast Customer off the ground. Since then, the District-based company has raised an additional $750,000 in funding.
Hay and Dragushan would not disclose revenue figures but said the company, which gets much of its income from advertising, is not profitable yet.
“Our sales strategy doesn’t quite exist yet, but we’ve found that users — and businesses — have been very happy with it.”
Pizzitola, who heard about the app in December, said she uses Fast Customer two or three times a week.
Her first call was to Southwest Airlines. She typed in her phone number. Forty minutes later, her phone rang.
“I was absolutely amazed,” she said. “It feels like you’re cheating a little — but in a good way.”
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