Announcing CEO Office Hours

Hmm. 37signals is in an interesting position that offering phone chats is actually a <i>feature</i> not a bugfix. Although the point is to ask the CEO stuff about 37signals, there's a big perspective factor going on here.<p>At my startup, Ramamia, we've always been offering phone support 24/7. Through our mobiles. It doesn't matter that half of our userbase is in India and the optimal time for them is snoozing time for us (well, okay, snoozing time for my co-founder, seeing that it is 4am and I'm writing this), but I always felt it would help our sales conversions.<p>Interestingly, 37signals posted about why they didn't offer phone <i>support</i> last year: <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1161-why-would-you-want-to-call-me" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1161-why-would-you-want-to-ca...</a>

Reminds me of that article from a while back about how someone increased their sales by XX% by putting their phone number on their website. I couldn't find the article but it stood out to me at the time as making a lot of sense. A few years ago my boss asked me to look into pricing some support chat software and while there were a lot of companies offering said software it was really difficult to get in touch with anyone.

Sounds like a bit of a gimmick to me. Why would I want to talk to him? If I have a problem and need phone support, this isn't going to cut it obviously, nor is it intended as such. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how it works out in practice; maybe it will prove useful for some purpose that was difficult to foresee.

A simple yet inspiring idea...