This is bootstrapped/indie hacker-ish. Would appreciate feedback.
What it is: You create a link (e.g. onair/yourname), and anyone can call you from it. Caller uses a web browser to make the call (not dedicated app). You can create as many links as you want, and can direct calls to colleagues in a round-robin or escalation manner.
In a way, it's like the "opposite of Calendly"; whereas Calendly is about meetings in the future, OnAir is about immediate meetings.
Motivation behind it: One of our SaaS products was struggling to grow. We believed that if we provide more "hand holding" to visitors on the landing page, it will increase conversion. It's like speaking to the guy behind the counter before making a purchase. That idea/experiment, over time, became OnAir.
Feedback: Identifying the perfect use case / customer has not been easy. E-Commerce store owners, which I thought would be ideal customer profile, are not responding as expected (e.g. "why use this instead of a WhatsApp button?"). The value of branded links, round-robin, recording/transcription, lead capture, etc does not seem to matter much to them. Ideas are welcome.
Hope the market is mature now and products like this succeed. All the best.
And by "call" I mean direct, synchronous, real-time conversation. Whether literally a phone call, or an online voice or video call.
So much quicker, easier, and less chance for miscommunication IME.
For me at least, the first one that picks up my call is the one who gets my money. "Send us an email, here's our WhatsApp, ..." kind of thing, I don't even try.
Internally however, once I figure out someone is haphazard with meeting time and meanders around in meetings getting precious little if any action done, I take proactive measures.
When they request a meeting, I ask for the agenda and the outcomes they want to take out of the meeting. Most of the time, everything is hashed out in advance in async channels and the meeting is either highly abbreviated from the original invitation or cancelled altogether because it turns out, the rest of the invited attendees also weren't crisp on what the meeting organizer wanted.
The number of people who call for a meeting simply because they haven't organized their thoughts, asked the right people the right questions, and are simply waiting around for someone to tell them what the correct next step is...is thankfully not an alarming number, but nonetheless simply a personally idiosyncratic annoyance to me.