Ifbyphone Blog

The ifbyphone success story continues… “Popcorn retailer finds ingredients to success”.

Here is an excerpt from today’s San Antonio Business Journal:

Garth Dennis, owner of San Antonio based World & Web Marketing, had been brought in a couple of months earlier to help redesign Papa Dean’s Web site. Now he was being called on to help with the spike in call volume that was threatening to put a crimp in the company’s blossoming sales.

Dennis knew just who to call. As a reseller for Skokie, IL. based Ifbyphone, a telephone application company, he was familiar with their products aimed at bringing enterprise level telecommunications technology to small business customers.

Soon, he had Papa Dean’s hooked up with a virtual receptionist platform that routed all the company’s calls through a series of menu items, answering simple questions and routing them to the company’s ecommerce Web site before allowing the few callers who still insisted on speaking to a live person through to the store.

“One morning I was freaking out and almost in tears because I couldn’t keep up with the phone calls. It was insane,” Staglik says. “Ifbyphone came to our rescue.”

Ifbyphone’s virtual receptionist helped to ease the pressure on in-person customer service and gave call-in customers, both existing and prospective, more information, Staglik adds.

Read The Full Article
Learn About The Virtual Receptionist
Visit Papa Dean’s Popcorn
Visit World & Web Marketing

Click-to-Call isn’t just for business. With the ubiquitous mobile handset morphing into an on-the-go media center, click-to-call offers a simple and elegant user-interface for any mobile Web application.

National Public Radio apparently sees it that way.

The recently debuted NPR Mobile Web is a partnership with ten local stations that delivers specially formatted text, pictures and audio - including streaming audio — to Web-enabled mobile phones.

To listen to news stories, or play the interactive version of NPR’s popular quiz game, “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me,” simply click on the “call’ icon and start listening. The free service is carrier- and device-independent.

Think of how useful this could be for GPS navigation or any other service people look for when they’re on the move. We keep saying this: keyboards are for typing - phones are for talking.

“Who you gonna call?” World & Web Marketing called ifbyphone to rescue Papa Dean’s Popcorn from drowning in its own success.

The ifbyphone virtual receptionist success story was featured today in the San Antonio Express-News. Below is an excerpt:

Staglik had gone to San Antonio-based World & Web to revamp their Web site. Between the walk-in traffic and the Internet orders, Papa Dean’s suddenly was too successful.

“I called up Garth Dennis,” Staglik said, referring to World & Web’s founder. “I said, ‘We’re drowning here. What can you do for us?’.”

That same day, Dennis patched the Web site into Ifbyphone, a Skokie, Ill.-based phone applications service.

“It’s like having a virtual receptionist that is collecting information from your customers,” explained Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro. “So when you get to them, you have additional information and you can handle their order more effectively.”

Staglik said the service rescued the shop’s holiday season. And it gave Papa Dean’s much more information on clients than staff could have acquired under such rush circumstances.

Read the full article
Learn About The Virtual Receptionist
Visit Papa Dean’s Popcorn
Visit World & Web Marketing

I was reading this excellent post by Paul Sweeney today. One of the things he touches on regularly is customer service. Today he mentions a couple websites I frequent: Summize and GetSatisfaction. Summize is a search tool for Twitter, and GetSatisfaction is a website that shows conversations surrounding particular companies and products.

With so many ways to publish information (Twitter, blogs, websites, Facebook, etc), it is becoming increasingly easy for consumers to let people know they’re unhappy with a company. You’ve heard the expression that word of mouth is the best advertising? How powerful is word of mouth when you can press a few keys and complain about poor customer service to hundreds of your friends on the internet? How much damage can one unhappy customer do?

This can be a little scary for companies. But it shouldn’t be. View it for what it is: an opportunity. Pay attention to your customers. You have all kinds of information about what they think about you and your competitors. Find it. Read it. But more importantly, act on it.

Call them. I recently had an experience with DirecTv, where I was close to canceling my account after being a vocal proponent for 10 years. When they found out about my unhappiness (via searching Summize), they called me. That phone call was more important than anything else they could have done. Someone with the ability to help me took a proactive step and called one of their millions of customers and had a conversation about how to make it right. Now that negative press I was giving them turned into a positive customer service experience and positive press.

As we like to say, the phone is the Rodney Dangerfield of technology. It gets no respect. But really, it’s still the most powerful and productive technology that most business have at their disposal. So use social media and the internet to find out what your customers think. But follow up by the phone. Your customers want to hear from you.

Like Cracker Jack and baseball, peanut butter and jelly, or the proverbial horse and carriage, some things just go together. Like the mobile Web and click-to-call.

When people are searching on the mobile Web, it’s a good bet they’re looking for something they want right now. So it’s just plain smart to make it easy for them to get in touch - especially for businesses like restaurants where reservations are important.

Jessica Dolcourt at Download.com has highlighted three mobile applications that incorporate click-to-call: Golf.com, Find It! For Blackberry and Zagat To Go (which has added click-to-call since Dolcourt’s post). Expect to see more smartphone and PDA applications incorporating click-to-call as the mobile Web extends its reach.

Recently in this space we’ve talked about the lack of interesting VOIP Applications. It seems that people all over are asking where the apps are. No less than Jeff Pulver has decried the lack of innovation in this space. At first, I objected to Jeff’s post, saying that there were several companies doing interesting things (us being one of them!). Then I had the chance to chat with him, and immediately came to the conclusion that he was indeed correct.

The functionality that IfByPhone provides, the tools we offer, are not in fact innovative. Shocking, isn’t it? And in actuality, I’ve said that here in the past. Big companies started adding voice to their existing applications years ago. Airlines use it to notify fliers that there is a flight cancellation. Prescription companies are making it easier to refill medications. There are a million uses.

So the tools have been around. The trick is that in order to use voice in applications there has been, historically speaking, a huge amount of overhead. You have to get a delivery mechanism - a physical way to make the calls. Then you have to monitor the ports, support them when they go bad. You have to get telco providers. Probably you will have to hire support people in IT to monitor and maintain the whole system. You have to hire and support very specific types of developers (ones that understand VXML). Developers that likely will only work on voice applicaitons. You have to maintain very comlpex code, and any changes to your applicaitons are also going to be expensive. Rolling out new applications? Start from scratch.

If you are a huge company, you have options. You can play off a couple vendors who do big-league IVR systems against each other, and get them to eat the cost of development. They probably deliver phone calls for a living, so they’ll eat that cost because you are going to send them more than enough traffic to make up for it.

But let’s say you’re not a major airline. What happens if you don’t drive millions of minutes of traffic? Well, you are out of luck. No matter what the ROI would be, adding voice to your business operations was a non-starter. You simply can’t get over the hump to make the effort worthwhile.

Here is the true power of IfByPhone. We make it easier for any developer to use voice. I talk to a lot of developers who want to use our tools to add voice to their applicaitons - and the number one thing I hear in almost every conversation is ’straightforward.’ If you have a developer that can run a query on your database and write a little PHP or ASP code, that’s all you need.

We’re a better tool box. With us, you use a GUI (graphical user interface) to design the application. Then you access it securely over the internet. We’re the right tool for the job, if the job involves voice. I would strongly recommend you spend 15 minutes today thinking of all the various aspects of your business that you don’t like doing. What are the things you have to do, but take you and your employees away from creating more revenue? What are the things you’d like to be able to do but don’t have the time?

Do you like following up on late invoices? Do you want to call and remind people of their upcoming appointments? Are you using a call center but are spending a lot of money while they ask or answer the same questions over and over? Are you gathering leads and losing money because you can’t verify their phone numbers or they go cold? Would you like to use your knowledge of your customers to combine an order received phone call with an upsell?

We have the tools to solve all those problems. All you need to do is sprinkle a little PHP on it (or ASP if you like), tie it with your database, and you have your voice enabled application :). Don’t read me wrong, it will take work. But if you have access to a developer you trust, you should strongly consider adding voice to your line of business applications. The ROI will amaze you.

If you are a consultant or a developer, spend a few minutes trying to understand your clients’ pain points as they relate to communicating with their customers. Pitch them on ways you can make their life easier and make them more money, and watch their reaction. To paraphrase “Field of Dreams” - “Build the apps and they will come.”

If you’d like to talk to me about it, click here.

Here’s news to make online marketers salivate: A majority of mobile Internet users (three in five) “are more inclined” to buy in response to relevant opt-in ads on their phones, according to a 2008 study conducted by UK-based mobile ad agency Aerodeon. And it’s not just impulse shopping like songs from iTunes. Almost half of regular mobile Internet users reported using the mobile Web to research big ticket purchases like vacations and cars.

Aerodeon reports that slightly more than half of all people who use the Internet on their PCs also use the mobile Internet. When you look at 18 to 24 year-olds, mobile Internet use rises to nearly 80 percent. And two-thirds of all mobile Web users use it to search. All of this presents a huge, unfolding marketing opportunity.

Now, you might assume that the most common interaction between mobile Web visitors and advertisers would be a click-to-call – you are, after all, on a phone. The mobile Internet would seem to be the single most ideal medium for click-to-call.

However, Internet marketers don’t appear to have gotten the message. My brief and admittedly unscientific research – comparing Google hits – indicates that the preferred call to action for a mobile Web ad is a text message. A search on “mobile campaign” and “text messaging” lands 5,470 hits, while “mobile campaign” and “click-to-call” gets a measly 622 hits.

I guess when all you can see is a keyboard, every problem looks like text.

However, there are some voices crying out in the mobile Web marketing wilderness. Joe Whyte of Search Marketing Standard recommends click-to-call for mobile landing pages – right after a “clear and precise call to action.”

Here’s what Whyte has to say:

“The great thing about mobile marketing is that the users are more apt to take advantage of this medium. They are already on the phone so, by providing a click to call option on your mobile site, you’re increasing the odds of that user turning into a lead for your business.”

VoIP may be thought of mostly as a way of communicating with voice over the Web, but the functionality of it allows for a wide variety of uses.  A new article in VoIP-News.com titled 30 Ways to Use VoIP That You’ve Never Heard Of lists a bunch of possibilities.  Some of my favorties:

Number 4, Do business while you’re in bed
Number 8, Create podcasts
Number 15, Speak in other languages

Only a handful of e-marketers include customer satisfaction in their Web marketing metrics, according to Antone Gonsalves at Intelligent Enterprise. This data, from a recent eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit survey, shows just how far Web marketing can detour around the reality-based world.

It doesn’t take a rocket to understand that customer satisfaction drives that all-important metric, conversion rate – or that without it, conversion rates nose-dive.

While online surveys are useful for gauging customer satisfaction, they force answers into predetermined boxes – they’re black and white. Adding voice to the online marketing mix adds the Technicolor of inflection, phrasing and context to build a full color picture of customer satisfaction.

For example, “I’m working on my car and I need to remove a bolt from the carburetor. I had to look all over for the right wrench and then when I finally found the automotive wrenches, there was hardly any information,” supplies insight about how customers expect to navigate your store or site — and why they might abandon before buying. Plus, it delivers context information for keyword optimization and ad buys.

The familiar click-to-call supplies the mechanism for smoothly incorporating voice into the online mix. Here’s how:

Ask customers to participate in a brief survey by simply clicking on a phone icon on the page or in an email. This connects them directly to a voice-directed survey that includes multiple choice as well as open-ended questions. While you have them on the phone, you can even immediately route unhappy customers to a service representative, pre-briefed from the survey results.

You can also reuse the results to add customer comments to your website for a more compelling testimonial. Let’s face it, hearing and talking is our natural communication medium, not reading and writing.

More than a year ago PhoneGnome CEO David Beckmeyer posed the question Where are the Voice 2.0 developers? We’re still waiting for the answer, says FierceVoIP editor Doug Mohney in his post, Pulver’s Purple Prophesies–And Fallout Thereof, charting VoIP’s journey from industry-disrupting new technology to plain vanilla status quo. 

If you’ve been around the VoIP space any length of time you’ve heard plenty about the uber-cool applications that digital voice was going to bring us. Well, we have mobile personal ads from Jangl – wait, didn’t Jangl go under a few weeks ago? 

Let’s face it, whether you call it rich voice or Voice 2.0, the pickings are slim. Talk about the impossible dream. Searching Google News on “rich voice VoIP” yields three hits. One is about fax-over-VoIP and the other two are about the same services for public safety agencies. Not exactly paradigm-shifting.

A decade later the VoIP industry has barely scratched the surface on the opportunity presented by turning phone calls into data. The last VON show in San Jose was all about new variations on the century-old theme of making and delivering phone calls. Like one more Baskin Robbins flavor – it’s still just ice cream. A new Skype handset is still…a handset.

Instead of making more ice cream maybe we should think about making something new — using the flexibility that VoIP opens up for making business operations smarter, more efficient, and more effective.

For example, add a short IVR to capture information like address or account number to route calls to the nearest office, look up account information or schedule a service call. Or think outside the phone call envelope altogether, as PEAK Technologies has done in its voice-based supply chain applications.

Just as we no longer write separate applications to update customer name in the accounts receivable and customer order systems, it’s time to stop silo-ing voice in something called the “phone system.” But that’s not going to come from the VoIP industry – it’s still too busy making cheap phone calls.