Ifbyphone Blog

There is a great deal of value in allowing your users the ability to contact the right people, at the right time with the right information.  One of the great benefits of social media is that it allows you to get in contact with people who you are interested in.  I can go to Facebook and keep up with the lives of former classmates, current friends and even business associates.  I can go to Twitter and participate in conversations as disparate as SEO, fatherhood or the stunning sweep of the Cubs by the first place White Sox this past weekend.  There are a great deal of other social media sites that have found niches in keeping people connected.

Generally speaking, most of the communication that these sites facilitate is electronic.  Email, posting on message boards or walls, instant messaging.  For many types of conversations, those forms of communications work really well.  But there are certain conversations that do not lend themselves to email or IM or board posts.  There are certain conversations that really require a direct human-to-human call.

One of our partners is JumpForward, a social media site that specializes (among other things) in assisting athletes to get in contact with colleges that may be interested in recruiting them. Last week we announced the partnership, check out this video:

JumpForward is using our technology to allow athletes and coaches work together more effectively.  If you are involved in organized athletics of any kind, I’d highly recommend you spend a few minutes on thier site.

Without getting *too* philosophical, I think JumpForward is really at the cutting edge of communications.  It’s nice that I can go to my Facebook page and see that a friend loves WallE or hates the new ColdPlay album.  But I think there is untapped potential in hooking up people who need to talk to each other at the right time, in the right way.  I think that it’s a direction we’re headed, albeit slowly.

In the mean time, we’re happy to be at the forefront with JumpForward.

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Interested?  Click here and I’ll give you an immediate call back.

Mike Cooch outlines six basic essentials for a good website and delivers solid information on how to achieve it in this month’s Everon Technology Insider. Rule number six is: “Clear “conversion” path/instructions.”

It’s a sad commentary that ten years after the Internet revolution many websites are their own worst enemies when it comes to conversion. Conversions go down when the number of steps goes up. Click-to-call cuts those steps — especially when there are several choices. As someone once said: “Systems run best when they run downhill.”

Venture Beat reports that American Express customers can now take Reardon Commerce’s personal concierge with them when they leave home. It illustrates the converging of several trends: context-centric application mash-ups, multiple ways of interacting — voice, SMS, email, Web. This could be taken to the next level with a smart interactive voice application at the end of the click-to-call to increase the efficiency at the other end — think about changing travel plans — and to eliminate typing on tiny keyboards.

With virtualization - and its fellow travelers: on-demand functionality and free form mashups — as the belles of the tech ball these days, it’s surprising how little buzz there is about these subjects in the telephony space. There the prevailing model remains a fixed suite of functionality from a single vendor.

So I was initially excited to find, tucked away on TMCnet.com, a contributed article whimsically titled, “Improvise Your Own Voice Over IP Services.” Clicking over, I hoped to find some Voice 2.0 thinking about the possibilities of Communications as a Service. Alas, the piece – written in a style most generously described as not that of an native English-speaker — was about managed telecom switch partitioning, not cool end-user mashups.

However, it started me imagining some very possible voice mash-ups.

For example, you can deploy a VoIP trunk to deliver dial tone, connect that to an existing PBX via a VoIP gateway, and use IfByPhone as a “virtual” IP-PBX and for building specialized IVR applications. Later on, you can replace the PBX but still use IfByPhone for IVR and click-to-call. You can add on-demand contact center functionality to the mix and a Skype gateway for overseas calls.

The point is that each of these elements is independent of the other and doesn’t constrain your ability to freely build — and quickly adopt — tailored business systems incorporating voice. In other words, improvising your own voice services.

It’s a mistake to see the mobile Web as just a “smaller” version of the desktop Web. That mobile Web is really a whole new animal with completely different dynamics. Nothing makes that clearer than this post, Get Clickthrough Rates Through the Roof, by Mike Baker, CEO of Nokia mobile Web marketing subsidiary Enpocket. Baker reports that mobile Web clickthrough rates average 2-6 percent — and gives one example where CTR was an exceptional 8 percent.

The reason? An “engaging” user experience, Baker says. An experience that’s connected to what you’re doing right now.

Think about that. If you’re surfing the Web on your phone, chances are you’re looking for something specific and entertaining — you’re not doing research for your term paper on your phone, right?

Perhaps you’re looking at Daily Show clips or listening to music. Or maybe you want to find a restaurant or a store. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to figure out that someone searching for “Chinese food” on a mobile phone has a higher-than-average probability of clicking on an ad for a nearby Chinese restaurant. To make that experience even more engaging, put a click-to-call in the ad so making reservations and getting directions are as easy as rolling downhill.

Customer service is an often overlooked opportunity to turn browsers into buyers and buyers into return customers. In How to Mine Your Customer Service Department for Nuggets of Marketing Gold, Marketing Sherpa provides detailed guidance on how to do — including the value of click-to-call to make your company easily accessible, and to give agents a leg up on caller information.

In a recent post, Mike Moran at Small Business Answers says that the dynamics of the Web favor small businesses. Not only because the Web levels the playing field, but also because small businesses don’t have the time, money or resources to get tied up in the analysis paralysis that plagues big companies.

Clay Oliver at E-Commerce Times has a post on how “get social” with your market by building communities around your products at social media sites like Facebook.

We have released the new version of IfByPhone. It hasn’t been that long since we did a dot release, but, frankly, our developers are incredible. Full release details can be found on our support page.  Here are a couple highlights:

* Scheduled & Emailed Reports: You can now schedule a report to run on any frequency you choose and select from reporting periods of previous day, week, month or year.

* Enhanced Call Detail Report: In addition to the current Call Detail Report, there is now a Call Detail Report V2.0 that is now customizable, allowing you to view only the data you are interested in.

* Enhanced Find Me reporting: The Call Detail Report now lists the progression of events each time your Find Me lists are invoked. Previously, you only saw the final number that accepted the call. You will now see each number that the Find Me list runs through and a brief reason if the call was passed on to the next number.

* Transferred Calls Report: You can now view a report that will tell you which phone number was the final recipient of an inbound call, as well as other data associated with this final destination number.

* SurVo Report: View SurVo results via the reporting tool instead of inside the SurVo page.

Find Me enhancements include:

* Custom “Hold Music” audio files: You can now upload your own wav audio files to play music or speech while a caller to a Find Me list is waiting to be connected.

* “No Answer” Timeout: You can now specify the amount of time, between 10 and 60 seconds, you want the Find Me application to wait while it tries to locate a phone number on a list, before it decides it’s a “no answer” and rolls over to the next number on the list.

* Bypass Option: You now have the ability to “bypass” all the numbers on a Find Me list and go directly to your specified action at the end of a Find Me list. Simply press the * key when you are prompted to accept a call and the system will handle the call based on the action to be performed at the end of the call list.

Interested? Let’s talk.

I’m a big fan of Social Media in general.  Anything that can bring people together and help create interesting conversations has a great deal of value.  I’m on Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Facebook, keep about 3 blogs besides this one, am online on about 5 different IM platforms, and I put my click-to-call in almost every email I send out.  I like having conversations with people.

But for many people, Social Media is a little too much.  It’s hard to keep up with all of the information.  Based on the way these services are setup, it IS hard to keep up with all the different conversations.  It’s hard to even explain the differences to people who aren’t already among the early adopter crowd.

So I’m starting to try and explain  them as distribution methods.  What does that mean exactly? These services simply assist in facilitating, recording and delivering conversations. Take Twitter for example.  You can get information into and out of Twitter in several different ways (IM, Twitter clients, the Web, SMS), and you can get the information out in the same ways (plus Email).  Twitter is just a service that allows you to find people and talk about things of common interest.

Much in the same way that IfByPhone makes dealing with Phone applications easier, Twitter makes dealing with delivery of messages easier.

So it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to use Twitter as a way to notify me of incoming calls.  So I used IfByPhone technology and the Twitter API to post messages my Twitter account. Now when someone hits “connect” on my Click-to-call, I will get a secure, private message from Twitter saying “Inbound call from ……”  Since our API (and Twitter’s) are so easy to use, the whole project took about 30 minutes (for a non-developer like me).

And if you’re the enterprising type, seeing how easy it is to integrate IfByPhone with Twitter, it’s just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from writing a snippet of code that checks inbound phone calls with your CSR database.
Interested? Let’s talk.

My son just finished a term paper on the history of computers. One of the more interesting details he unearthed in the course of his research is this 1980 remark by an anonymous IBM employee: 

“Why on earth would you care about the personal computer? It has nothing at all to do with office automation. It isn’t a product for big companies who use ‘real’ computers.” 

I was reminded of the scene in the movie Casblanca where the Nazi commander, Major Strasser, refers to Rick Blaine as a “bumbling American.”  Police Captain Renault relies, “I wouldn’t underestimate American bumbling, Major. I was with them when they bumbled into Berlin in 1918.”

Looking back from our 21st century vantage point, it’s clear that the PC, and then the public World Wide Web, caused sea-changes in culture, business and technology that almost completely displaced the old world order of monolithic mainframes. 

But paradigm-changing as the Web was, our understanding of it is also based on some unexamined assumptions. One of them is that the interface with the Web is necessarily typed text. Just as the personal computer toppled accepted wisdom about interacting with computers, new ideas about Web interaction could just as easily depose today’s model. After all, people talked long before they wrote.

As you may guess, people are already pursuing those new ideas. Some of those people are in IBM’s India Research Lab.

The company’s recently announced mobile Web initiative includes a “Spoken Web” project that aspires to nothing less than transforming “how people create, build and interact with e-commerce sites on the World Wide Web using the spoken word instead of the written word,” according to the April 21, 2008 press release. “The Spoken Web is the World Wide Web in a telecom network, where people can host and browse “VoiceSites,” traverse “VoiceLinks,” even conduct business transactions, all just by talking over the existing telephone network.”

If you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense, if only because are 3.3 billion mobile phones in the world, according to the research firm Informa - about three times the number of PCs in use, (Forrester Research estimate). But there are other compelling arguments for the Spoken Web. 

Using the Web on a PC requires learning how to interact with a computer, operating system, browser and keyboard. There are many people in the world for whom this is a barrier - and not just because a computer might be beyond their means economically. Some can’t negotiate the complexity of setting up a computer, and some are handicapped and can’t type, but they’re all perfectly capable of asking a question.

We go to the Web all the time to find don’t need require the processing power - or baggage - of a PC. For example, weather conditions, making appointments, or coupons and ads. For example, why should you have to be PC- and networking-savvy just to look up a map or find out what’s on sale at the market?

So the next time you look something up on the Web, think about how simple it would be if you could just ask your phone.