Ifbyphone Blog

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Khyle Keys, one of the new guys on the block at IfByPhone. I’m a Channel Manager here, which means that I work with our resellers. I’ve had a lot of experience working with companies that allow big companies the ability to better communicate with their clients. Big companies have been using automated voice systems to keep in better touch with their clients for years and years.

It’s easy for them to spend the money to have someone write custom apps that upsell their customers, let them know of special offers, interruptions of service, order shipments, any number of things. And using phones to keep in touch is simply good business practice. Even the best email communication program will be limited. You can’t really be sure how many emails got delivered. You can’t be sure how they are being viewed. Are the images showing up correctly in your customers email program?

The problem all along for small companies has been that there really haven’t been too many options to inexpensively use automated phone systems to keep in touch with their clients. Could a local Plumber afford to have a large company send out appointment reminders? Could a one or two person heating\AC company send out reminders to their customers that they should have their furnaces checked? The answer for a long time has been no. At least not in a way that is close to being affordable.

One of the many reasons IfByPhone is so…cool…is that we bring all of that functionality to the small business. We make it really affordable for them to use any number of different ways to keep in touch with their clients.

Nearly all small businesses realize the value of their website, and many are using advertising campaigns to draw traffic. With IfByPhone’s smart click-to-call, we can capture customers that would have otherwise moved on to the next site. With our Survo’s we can allow that heating company to create a simple reminder notice that will get them extra appointments.

We’re really providing a great tool set to small and medium sized businesses who want to gain that little extra edge.

Click here to talk to me.

Every minute of every day, somewhere, someone is pounding on their keyboard, or screaming at their computer, “How do I contact the people behind this web site, or this blog?” Too many web sites make it difficult for viewers to connect.

Later that same day you might become frustrated because the emails you sent to a business associate or friend landed in the black hole of a SPAM folder. Or maybe you were away from your computer and the screen on your phone is just too small to read, but you need to check on the delivery of the sofa you just ordered. If you call the sofa company they will put you on hold, forever. You just want to know the date of the delivery - why should this be so hard?

All of these examples are easily solved by better utilizing the everyday, plain old telephone. Telephones are everywhere today, at home, at work, in our pockets. Phone mashups combine the intimacy of the telephone with the efficiency of the web. In the examples above, you could provide a web site visitor with a Click-to-Call that connects the viewer’s telephone to your telephone. You could use an automated Voice Broadcast to send messages to your customers. With an Interactive Voice Response system, the sofa company could provide you with instant customer service while saving on staff and reducing costs.So why doesn’t every small business, web site creator, or blog author integrate their web world with their viewers’ telephones?

While the VoiceXML and CCXML standards have driven down the cost of custom IVR, these solutions are still too complex and expensive for many independent developers and small businesses. Many Click-to-Call solutions now available in the marketplace tend to be limited in flexibility. Phone mashups require flexibility.Phone mashup APIs need to be usable by any web developer with basic web form coding skills. In essence, the phone mashup API should replace web forms with voice forms.Ifbyphone provides a very flexible family of APIs (we call them Ifbyphone Glue) that includes the ability to:

• Initiate a traditional Click-to-Call between two parties
• Initiate a Click-to-Virtual Receptionist
• Initiate a Click-to-VoiceMail
• Initiate a Click-to a full featured interactive voice response system
• Initiate a Click-to a Find Me with full recording capabilities

Ifbyphone APIs also support the scheduling of voice broadcast messages, reminder calls, and wake up calls.In addition to initiating telephone connections from a web site, the communications facilitated by the Ifbyphone hosted platform may be activated from a telephone call. When someone calls into an Ifbyphone provisioned telephone number their call can be:

• Routed based on the caller ANI (caller ID)
• Routed based on the time of day and day of week
• Routed to a voice mail account
• Routed to a find me
• Routed to a virtual receptionist
• Routed to an interactive voice response application (IVR)

Ifbyphone IVR applications can be thought of as voice forms. If you know how to build a web site that uses a form to collect information, processes the information, and then displays another form, you know how to build a phone mashup.

SurVo Voice Forms** are created at the Ifbyphone web site and then invoked by an API or telephone call. A voice form consists of prerecorded or text-to-speech prompts and questions that are played for a caller, and then allows their responses to be recorded or converted into text.

When the caller reaches the end of a voice form, the Ifbyphone platform passes control to a web page you create. This web page can be hosted on any server, coded in any language and secured or unsecured. Your web page will receive the data collected via the telephone dialog (voice form) as a post or get in the same way you would collect information from an HTML form.

Once you have the data you can write it to a database, use it to query another web source, or process it in just the same way you would process information collected from any other form.  After processing, your web page outputs an XML file which tells the Ifbyphone platform what to do next. The next step can be another voice form, a find me, a virtual receptionist or even to just hang up the telephone. Data provided by your web page can be read to the caller or can be used to determine the next set of questions asked.

There is no limit to the number of voice forms or the number of transitions between your web pages and the Ifbyphone infrastructure.

To summarize, the Ifbyphone Glue (API) supports the combination of information accessible from the web for presentation via voice on any telephone.  All Ifbyphone services use real telephones and do not rely on desktop computer based VOIP services.

To learn more just take a look at the Ifbyphone Glue (API) documentation.

Ifbyphone Glue (API) Documentation

All Ifbyphone Documentation

**The name SurVo comes from the fact that initially this technology was built for creating customer surveys.

While there are many telephone technology conferences each year, two stand out. VON and eComm. VON is where the business professionals in the voice and telephony industries go to make deals. eComm is where the technologists go to innovate.

Prior to this year Etel (the predecessors to eComm) was an O’Reilly sponsored conference designed to provide a forum for people working in the emerging telephony technologies to get together, learn and network. When O’Reilly decided to drop the Etel conference a ground swell of discussion in the telco world lead Lee S Dryburgh to put his day job on hold and facilitate eComm as a replacement. As stated on the eComm site:

“eComm is the venue for those interested in the radical transformation of the trillion dollar telecommunications industry. It has already started down the path that the homebrew computer took three decades ago. Just as democratized computation gave birth to the computer industry, eComm is tracking, highlighting and promoting the people and technologies driving this new wave of democratization.

eComm brings out the visionaries, emergent technologies, real-world startups, cutting-edge academic projects, views from the incumbent telecom players; garage based hacks and stirs required policy debates to create the ultimate three-day conversation.

The story of the decentralization of communications innovation has past the second chapter which was VoIP. It is now regarded as a building block only. As a standalone service it is both uninspiring and unlikely to be highly profitable.”

The Ifbyphone phone mashup API is an ideal vehicle for developers looking to build creative web to phone applications. At my eComm 2008 talk I will describe the Ifbyphone architecture used to drive down the costs of sophisticated IVR applications while making them accessible to any web developer or small business.

Information about eComm 2008

Here’s a short letter from the editor of Speech Technology Magazine, the one company you’d think would positively, absolutely get their phone IVR to sound absolutely wonderful. That turns out not to be the case… in fact, they don’t even use speech recognition!I know they investigated and solved the problem (I visited their offices recently); when they provide a follow-up letter about this incident I’ll post that link as well.The moral of the story: think for yourself and think for your customers. First, think for yourself. Don’t blindly copy idiotic statements from other systems (”Please pay attention as our menu options have changed”) that are (a) not true and (b) not useful.And second, think for your customers. Again, it’s easy enough to put yourself into your customer’s shoes. Will your customers be mollified if you say “your call is important to us” or will they feel patronized? (Hint: when you call someone else’s system, how do you feel about that announcement?)

Have you ever tried to squeeze a plumber into an online shopping cart? Unlikely. The fact is that most small to medium size businesses using the Web are not shopping carts. They sell services and products that just don’t work that way — like landscape design, consulting, and acupuncture.

So when SMBs are asked what they want most from a Web site, they’re more than likely to answer: more phone calls. This makes sense. In the non-shopping cart world, sales are made ⎯ or at least initiated ⎯ with a phone call. It’s worth wondering, then, if small businesses are getting maximum value from their Web marketing dollars.

This was once a simpler question to answer. Once upon a time, all you needed for online presence was a website. That was easy enough. Then it had to be better than competitors’ sites. So you built a better one. As websites became more sophisticated, the focus shifted to driving traffic, and then invariably to pushing only the right visitors your way.

And now, businesses are looking more carefully at how effective all of this is at converting their online spend to revenue. But what’s missing here? Have we forgotten that even before the Web, any sale started with the phone ringing?

Ironically, relatively few SMB sites have metrics telling them whether, and how many, site hits turn into phone calls ⎯ let alone intelligence like which keywords deliver the most calls. But if Web spend is intended to generate leads that are converted offline, how can you effectively measure Internet marketing ROI without this information?

Consider this. A good website should perform like a good salesperson ⎯ and it’s relatively easy to figure out if salespeople are bringing in more than they cost. And equally easy to see what kind of business is coming in. Shouldn’t it be the same for a website?

The abundance of metrics provided by Internet marketing solutions report how many visitors came to your site, how long they spent, what pages they came from, and what search terms they used. But if you convert visitors to customers offline, these pieces of intelligence don’t necessarily tell you if your website is a good salesperson, just breaking even, or underperforming.

Here’s where Web telephony changes the rules. Capabilities like click-to-call marry age-old phone calls with Web marketing. Instead of simply listing a phone number on a site, click-to-call turns any image on any page into a phone call trigger –a ‘call’ to action.

Because the phone call trigger is now a click, it can be measured like any other. When sites visitors click the call icon, that action is captured. Now you can see how many visitors called ⎯ and exactly which page they called from ⎯ in the same way you can see how many pages they looked at.

So is Web telephony the Holy Grail for improving your Web economics? Debatable, like anything else. Yet converting more visitors to callers does reduce per unit cost of leads and in turn, overall customer acquisition cost. And knowing which keywords drive the best phone calls will add intelligence to your keyword bidding, optimizing your spend – something worth consideration in the face of accelerating keyword inflation.

The bottom line: There’s more to click-to-call than meets the eye. Yes, it generates more calls and builds a better experience for site visitors. But it’s the role click-to-call plays in building a better Web ROI that makes it so valuable. Properly deployed, it’s a game changer. Tell your CFO about it.

“Not only has the company made many of its stores feel like gathering places, but the bright lights and equally bright acoustics create a buzz that makes customers feel more like they are at an event than a retail store.”

You’d think the above quote, with its jazzy words and tingling appeal, is describing a movie opening in Los Angeles or a cocktail party at some music executive’s mansion. Not so. Taken from a recent New York Times article, the author is describing an Apple Store in Manhattan’s meatpacking district just after midnight. At two a.m., while most of America was asleep, the Apple Store was glowing with the cha-ching of excited holiday shoppers (or, rather, the silent whoosh of the portable credit card swipers each employee carries with him to conduct business on the spot). Apple is not the first store to deck itself out in bright lights and cool colors in the big city – Nike, Sony, and other corporate giants have succeeded with this model. But as the article so clearly displays, no one has done it with quite the panache that Apple has. By allowing customers to linger for hours, check their email, or write a book (!) Apple has not built retail stores so much as it has invented a lifestyle. In a similar way that Starbucks made the $4 cup of coffee culturally ubiquitous by adding a snappy attitude to the morning’s dull routine, Apple has reinvented the computer and technology industry with its hipster cool and simple message: Apple is easy and Apple makes you happy.

But the point is not to be missed – there’s more to it than bringing aboard a rock star interior designer and a team of twenty-somethings with a quirky taste in music. The key to Apple’s success, as much as its products, is its service. Apple makes us feel good, light on our feet, pleased to be alive. And they encourage us to spend money (which we are doing at an alarming rate) because we feel so good. The business model of exceptional service is impeccable, and it’s exactly the type of paradigm that Ifbyphone subscribes to. We’ve all dealt with poor customer service departments –the mere term “customer service” is enough to make many of us cringe – who have made us feel stupid, inept, and much worse at the end of the conversation, even if our problem has been solved. Ifbyphone believes in absolute commitment to our customers. There may be companies who offer some of the services we do at a more economical price, but no one in the industry offers the level of service and reliability that we do. If you have a problem – or just want some help figuring the best way to implement the Ifbyphone toolbox – you know we’ll get back to you quickly and amicably.

When you sign up with Ifbyphone you receive a top-notch product, but more than that you become privy to a qualified crew of industry experts who act as your own personal team of voice tech consultants. And getting great support to compliment the technology that will help your business grow – well, that’s what buzz is all about.

Here’s a story from a local institution that had a budget problem. One department found that they always overspent their budget but no one could ever find out why. Eventually a new person joined the staff and decided to solve the mystery, and discovered that the money was leaking out of the department because a completely different department was using it to pay for their office supplies. And how was that possible? It seems that the institution assigned budget numbers in numerical order. A simple clerical error, getting one digit in the account number wrong, allowed one department to drain money — for years — from the budget of a different department.

Now imagine the same thing happening at your company before you introduce automated account information. Someone speaks to their customer service representative (or to you) and you have a conversation. If they give you the wrong account number, it’ll be clear fairly rapidly what the problem is. And if someone calls and tries to get information about a competitor’s account, you’ll figure that one out pretty quickly as well.

After you introduce automation, what prevents a caller from calling in and trying account numbers in sequence until they hit one that works? What if the caller is attempting fraud, or is attempting to access competitive information (about you or your customers)? And what if they make an honest mistake?

As a best practice, whether you have automation or not, the account numbers you assign should not be simply sequential. The most secure method is to assign a random number to each account. If that’s too complex, you might consider adding a single random number to the end (or the beginning, or the middle) of sequential account numbers. Or you can use one or more random digits and add one or two additional “checksum” digits, which is the method used by credit card companies to prevent people from guessing or confusing credit card numbers.

Is this a big change? Yes, it is. Is it necessary? Good question. Unless my company had a history of making accounting errors based on incorrect customer numbers, I wouldn’t bother switching old numbers for new ones, but I would start assigning new numbers with a little more care. If my company does experience problems — fraud, errors, and the like — than of course it pays to make corrections. And if my company safeguards important information for customers, such as medical records, I would be very cautious. I can’t speak to the legal requirements, but if an inexpensive change (and this change might be very expensive in some cases) can help protect against privacy violations, that’s what I would choose.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: if your phone service is awful and I happen to run across it, I might decide to mention it as a Bad Example in talks and articles for years to come.

Today is the turn of a major shipping company — let’s call it MPS, for Major Parcel Service — to be held up as a Bad Example. MPS made an automated call to my house yesterday morning. They informed me that I was “scheduled” to receive a package that day; that it would arrive between 8 AM and 7 PM; that it required a signature. Oh, and that they could not tell me, even approximately, what time it would arrive, nor could I submit a request for an arrival time. The most I could do was hit the “1″ key to hear the message again.

As messages go, that one was rather useless. Does MPS really think I’m going to hang around all day, not stepping outside the door, in order to accommodate their delivery? For me, at least, the message was quite irritating, a sort of reminder that MPS regards their time as more valuable than my time, and that MPS can’t be bothered to make a guess about delivery times.

Fortunately, ifbyphone customers can do far better than MPS. If you use ifbyphone, you can make interactive outbound calls to customers using speech recognition and DTMF digits to collect customer feedback. “Would you like delivery in the morning or afternoon? Around what time would you like the delivery? Thank you, we will arrive between 1 PM and 3 PM…”

Does this really matter? Absolutely. In August 2007 — remember that one-day terrible storm here in Chicago? — I received an automated phone call from American Airlines. My flight from New York to Chicago had been canceled and I had been re-booked for the next day. They gave me the new flight information and the option to press 0 to speak to an operator. That was absolutely terrific customer service, because it gave me information and the ability to manipulate that information in a useful way. I promptly re-scheduled the flight to a more appropriate time without having to call into American Airlines, work my way through their menus, and wait on hold for the next available agent. Pressing 0 got me to an operator who knew exactly who I was and why I was calling.

The moral of the story: outbound calls are an intrusion. They must be interesting, to the point, informative, and interactive, not just convenient for the company that makes the call.