connect

A robot that waits on hold so social service clients don't have to

codeforamerica
15
3
Ruby

Connect

Build Status

A digital service to improve the experience of calling social service offices — call a number to have your place held, instead of waiting on hold. When a human is on the other line, you get a call back!

What it is

This is a alpha-stage digital service built using Twilio.

The current flow works like this:

  • You call in and hear a pleasant message that we’ll call you back someone’s ready
  • The service calls the agency, and enters digits to get to the “holding” screen
  • When an agency rep picks up, they hear a message from their boss telling them to press 1 to connect with a client
  • You get a call connecting you with the rep!

AFTER the call, you will get another call asking you if you were connected with a rep or not (by pressing 1 or 2). This way we gather data on how frequently agency reps are hanging up.

The original idea was from a conversation between @alanjosephwilliams and @lippytak, when discussing their ongoing research. The ideas of @daguar greatly influence how we perceive the potential value of the service. Further discussion of the idea can be found in the ideas repo.

This is a project of CFA’s Health SpecOps Team.

Benefits

  1. Stop wasting your time
  2. Stop wasting your minutes

Deployment

To deploy, push to Heroku and then set the following environment variables:

  • PHONE_NUMBER_TO_CONNECT: the phone number of the office to call, for example ‘+14151112222’
  • BUTTON_SEQUENCE_TO_REACH_HOLD: a button sequence that gets you to the “holding” part of the phone system, for example “www1ww1ww2” for “wait 1.5 seconds, press 1, wait 1 second, press 1, wait 1 second, press 2”
  • TWILIO_SID: your Twilio SID
  • TWILIO_AUTH: your Twilio auth token
  • TWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER: your Twilio-purchased phone number

Then, in the Twilio dashboard, configure the “voice URL” for your phone number to be a POST to “https://my-app-name.herokuapp.com/call/initiate”

Local Development

To get started, clone the repo and cd into the directory.

You will need to use Ruby 2.1.1 for this app. To install, we recommend using RVM (rvm install 2.1.1).

Then, install dependencies:

bundle install

And run tests simply with:

rspec

License & Copyright

Copyright Code for America Labs, 2014; MIT License