The History of GetHuman
Prologue
In the beginning... actually - before the beginning - was Paul English, the founder of GetHuman.com. In the mid-2000s, Paul was helping taking care of his father, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. He found when his father had an issue with the cable company or just about any large business, he would try to call the customer service line but then get frustrated and lost in the maze of phone menu options. Paul already had plenty of his own frustration with calling customer service, but for him this was a last straw.
So Paul began cataloguing major companies, writing down their phone numbers and then the sequence of numbers or "DTMF codes" a person would have to press to get through the phone menu to an actual human. Prior to this, Paul had already been a serial technology entrepreneur, so naturally he added this information to his existing personal blog, accessible to anybody that could browse the Web. He called his list of companies The IVR Cheat Sheet. IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response, which is the technical term for those pesky phone menu systems.
When Paul's friends heard about the IVR Cheat Sheet, they asked him to add more phone numbers for the businesses that they needed to call. And they told their friends, who told their friends. By 2005, the IVR Cheat Sheet was its own website had dozens of company phone numbers and information about how to get through the IVR system to a real human being.
The Early Years - 2005-2007
As the IVR Cheat Sheet became increasingly popular, Paul needed help. Friends and interested parties from all over offered to pitch in, helping gather and publish information on the website. Traffic on the website grew rapidly as well. By the end of 2005, Paul noted at least 1 million visitors. In early 2006, Paul decided to rename the IVR Cheat Sheet to GetHuman and host it on the very domain you are reading right now (gethuman.com).
Paul began getting press requests, with consumers everywhere applauding his battle to make customer service less opaque. By 2006, GetHuman (well, Paul) had been interviewed by every major news and media company. Paul even did an interview with Katie Couric about GetHuman.com and was featured in People magazine (see photo).
But GetHuman posed a strange problem for Paul. GetHuman had started as a hobby and personal quest. But Paul was already very busy building his new company KAYAK.com. Paul was the CTO of KAYAK, which was also growing rapidly. By late 2006, he was getting so many press requests for tv shows, magazines and other news outlets for GetHuman, that he felt it was disruptive to his work at KAYAK. In 2007, Paul made the difficult choice to stop working on GetHuman altogether so that it wouldn't distract him from his work at KAYAK.
The Quiet Years: 2007-2010
The GetHuman.com website remained frozen in time for years as Paul kept his promise to himself to leave it alone and focus on KAYAK. Meanwhile, KAYAK grew into one of the most popular travel search websites on the planet, and even later had an IPO, becoming a publicly traded company in July 2012.
A New Beginning: 2010-2013
In 2010, Christian Allen was working at KAYAK. He had built KAYAK's first iPhone™ app, and was very interested in the fledgling world of smart phone apps. In a chance conversation with Paul, Christian learned about GetHuman for the first time. GetHuman stood out to Christian as a great example of a website that should have a smartphone app, and so he boasted to Paul that he thought he could build an iPhone™ app for GetHuman over a weekend. Which is just what he did.
Christian published the iPhone™ app to Apple's App Store™ a few days later. A week later, when Christian checked to see if anybody was downloading it, he saw that it already had many downloads. With Paul's permission, he installed Google Analytics™ on the gethuman.com website, curious if the site still had any visitors. To their surprise, even after being stale for years, many people were still using the gethuman.com website every day to find customer service phone numbers.
After this, Christian became increasingly interested in whether or not there was still demand for the information that GetHuman provided. He sought help from Adam Goldkamp and others who were interested in the website to help refresh the website's information to make it more up-to-date. Like with Paul, the GetHuman effort continued to be a hobby, but Christian and Adam and others made small changes here and there to try to improve the site when they had time.
GetHuman the Company: 2013-2016
By 2013, Christian was no longer working at KAYAK. He was convinced that GetHuman still served a need, and the very large number of consumers that still used it everyday proved it. He also was convinced that GetHuman could sustain itself - ie pay for the servers and technology that run it as well as staff to keep the information up-to-date - by showing ads on its pages. Ads are annoying, but Christian reasoned that it would allow the website to thrive and remain free to its visitors.
Paul agreed, and in early 2013, they registered GetHuman as a Massachusetts-based business for the first time.
Around this time, Jeff Whelpley, long time software developer, moved to Boston and also took an interest in GetHuman. While Paul maintained an advisory role, Christian, Adam, and Jeff went about experimenting and expanding the gethuman.com website to see what other ways they could help consumers with customer service problems. Among other things, the website added customer service reviews, a service that would wait on hold for you and call you back when a rep picked up, and received a major design overhaul.
The End-to-end Service Years: 2016-2018
By late 2015, the team behind GetHuman was frustrated. Despite their effort to try to share more and more information about the customer service experience with consumers everywhere, it didn't feel like enough. Most consumers still endured long waits on hold, confusing phone menus, and a generally poor customer experience whenever they had an issue with one of the major companies with whom they transacted - even in spite of the shortcuts that GetHuman was providing for free.
A small startup in England called Ringr was signing up subscribers to a service which offered to solve customer service issues for the subscriber, on their behalf. The team at GetHuman reached out to brothers Ed and Rob who had founded Ringr and together they agreed to try to work together and offer this service to users of the gethuman.com website. The idea was to go further than providing information by solving customer service problems for the masses instead.
To make this work, GetHuman hired a team of "solvers". From the gethuman.com website, you could hire solvers to get on the phone for you, to talk to Delta Airlines or Verizon Wireless on your behalf and resolve your problem for you.
Back to Basics: 2019-2022
The end-to-end service experiment lasted a couple of years. But in the end, it took a very long time and a lot of work to hand a customer service problem over to a "solver" and then have them resolve it for you. In the end, the team at GetHuman felt that it cost far too much money to resolve a customer service issue on behalf of another consumer. As a result, GetHuman would have to charge a lot of money for the service. Not only did the team doubt the economics of such a transaction, but also it felt distant from the original goal of helping consumers for free. By 2019, the GetHuman team had shuttered the end-to-end service and re-focused on improving the free components of the website.
The gethuman.com website went back to being 100% free to use as it had been. The team wrote and added thousands of free guides that would walk you through sticky customer service problems for various companies, trying to focus on what seemed like the most common issues. The website was translated into 10 different languages. Improvements were made to the "call-back" service that had stopped running during the end-to-end service years. And the mobile apps were refreshed and re-published to Google™ and Apple™'s respective app stores.
The Modern Era: 2023-today
Each day at GetHuman, we try to find more and more effective ways to help consumers navigate customer service problems. While we still maintain a database of 10s of thousands of customer service phone numbers, we continue to add more tools and more information that we believe makes those painful interactions a bit less painful for every consumer.
The gethuman.com website looks very different today than it did in 2004 when Paul published his first blog post about it. Today, over 50 million people visit the GetHuman website each year and there is far more information (than a list of phone numbers), that our team is endlessly researching and writing about. But we still call company phone numbers every day, and we still show you what sequence of buttons will get you through the phone maze the fastest, just like the good old days. :)