Ifbyphone Blog

Simplicity.  That’s one of the key tenets at Ifbyphone.  We enable our customers to use phones to get more value out of their business without a lot of fuss.  That’s one reason we keep rolling out new applications (Conference Calling, Store Locator, Virtual Call Center and more on the way).  Customers can have these applications live within a few minutes after signing up for an account.

We provide even more value by letting our customers develop their own applications using our developer API.  And even our API is simple.  We use HTTP based communication.  This means you can capitalize by having your developers write code in a language they already know.  Simple, and cost effective.

So in that vein, Phil, one of our Sales Engineers, found some time between helping customers and admiring rainbows to write a mashup with Yelp, the popular review site.  It took him about a half hour and 20 lines of code.  What the mashup does is allow you to call a Toll Free number (866.596.8333), and enter the 10 digit telephone number of the place you want information on.  We will check the Yelp database and tell you the total number of reviews as well as the average review.

Check it out…call 866.596.8333 and enter in the phone number for your favorite restaurant.  This will work with any review in the Yelp database.  If you don’t have a phone number handy, here are some of my favorite places to eat:

Flat Top Grill (Chicago, IL): 312.829.4800 - great make your own stir fry

Buffalo Wild Wings (Skokie, IL): 847.329.9333 - wings…mmm…

Pizza VIlla (DeKalb, IL): 815.758.8116 - the best pizza on earth

Real Chili (Milwaukee, IL): 414.271.4042 - the best chili on earth

Twin Anchors (Chicago, IL): 312.266.1616 - best ribs in Chicago

Keep the number - you never know when you’re out and about and want to know if a place is any good.

We’re already thinking of new features for this little mashup.  If you’re interested in developing your own mashups, click here to call me.  If you would like to suggest more mashups or features for the Yelp mashup, leave a comment.

As Halloween approaches, so does peak season for the $1 billion haunted house industry. As part of its seasonal haunted house marketing strategy, Missouri based Raycliff Manor worked with Ifbyphone to launch a unique approach to attracting new visitors. In addition to radio ads and press, Raycliff Manor is using Ifbyphone’s Smart Click-to-Call on its promotional website, eurekascreams.com, inviting website visitors to trigger a spooky click-to-call message to friends about the Raycliff Manor haunted house.

So far the results have been tremendous! As Raycliff Manor noted,

Your product and pricing make me a happy customer; your incredible Customer Service make me a customer that will tell everyone I know about your company! Thanks again to the Ifbyphone team for demonstrating the highest standards in providing an amazingly positive experience and for a great product!

Visit Raycliff Manor’s website to have Mortie call your friends from the grave.

Learn more about Ifbyphone’s Smart Click-to-Call.

One of the Ifbyphone team members coaches his daughter’s soccer team.   Every week, he had to email parents about the upcoming game time and location.  Every week, at least one parent would miss the email.

That all changed with the release of Ifbyphone’s Voice Broadcast iPhone App.  In under 5 minutes, he had entered the parents’ names, cell phone numbers and home phone numbers, and created a distribution group.   Now every week, in four easy taps he can launch a voice broadcast that ensures every parent gets a phone call with the crucial game information.  Most importantly, the parents love the messages over the clutter of email. (And, his team is undefeated).

Congrats to NLP Technologies who released the “Call Me Back!” iPhone app, powered by Ifbyphone, on the iTunes app store this week.

The idea is that you can get yourself out of a sticky situation by scheduling a call to yourself in advance.  As the NLP Technologies website says,

“Call Me Back!” is a lifesaver. It allows you to interrupt a meeting by telling your phone to call you, or by scheduling a call in advance. “Call Me Back” is available now for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Here is the Application Description on iTunes,

Ever think to yourself “Get me out of this meeting!” or “This guy is a whako, get me out of this date!”

Call Me Back gives you control over your life by allowing you to schedule a rescue call to yourself. You can schedule the call in the future so your colleague doesn’t see you fiddling with your phone, or you can demand a call back immediately, all at the press of a button.

The price includes up to 90 rescue calls.

Because we all have those moments we wish to escape!

Here are the screen shots:

“Schedule A Call Back”

“Select A Call Back Number”

The “Call Me Back!” app, powered by Ifbyphone, is availabe on the iTunes store for $7.99. You can download it by clicking here.

According to Paul Rodrigues of NLP Technologies,

“Writing phone applications for phone devices just makes sense, and you are going to be seeing a lot of these phone mash-ups over the next few years. Voice application programming sounds complex and time intensive, but if you know a little HTML, you’ll be able to grasp the Ifbyphone API in a couple hours.”

We’re happy to see that developers are choosing Ifbyphone to build their own custom voice applications and mashups.  As Paul notes, all you need is a grasp of HTML and a couple hours to develop a voice application.

If you are interested in learning more about Ifbyphone’s platform, click-to-call us.

Or just take a look at our free phone mashup developer accounts.

Ifbyphone is excited to announce the release of a new Find Me Call Forwarding option. Our customers can now use the simultaneous calls options to ring multiple phone numbers at the same time.

How would this be used? For example, let’s say you are distributing leads. When a call comes in, let it ring every sales person’s phone. The person who picks up first will get the lead. Alternatively, if you are out of the office you can let the Find Me forward calls to both your home phone and cell phone at the same time.

To set up this option, all you need to do is select the number of simultaneous calls from a drop-down list in the Find Me menu:

Thomas Howe just wrote a post describing 5 hidden powers of Click-to-Call.

While he is right on, I’d like to add a few of my own thoughts to his list:

6. Analytics - When someone calls off your website using Click-to-Call, you can access information about them not traditionally available via a regular telephone call. For example, you can see the search engine they used, the keyword term they used and the page they called from in addition to various data about the call like time and duration. This is helpful, of course, because you can learn which keyword terms are leading to phone calls, not just page views.

7. Hidden Click-to-Call- Another hidden power of click-to-call is that it can be, well, hidden. For example, let’s say a website visitor is filling out a web form on a lead generation or customer service page. If one of the input fields in the form asks for a phone number, when the visitor clicks “Submit My Info” this click can also trigger a phone call. Your phone and their phone will immediately ring, and this way you can contact the lead or speak with the concerned customer right away.

8. The “Cool” Factor- At least until click-to-call becomes a mainstream technology on every website, you can use it to easily impress people. For example, using Ifbyphone’s click-to-call, you can actually insert click to call into PDF dcouments, PowerPoint presentations, and email signatures. Let’s say you send a potential client or investor a PowerPoint presentation. On the last slide, write “Ready To Talk? Just Click!” with a click-to-call link below. Not only will they think it is neat, it may actually move the conversation along.

In regard to #5 of Thomas Howe’s list, “click-to-call adds anonymity to one or both legs of the call”, please take a look at my post on how to add click-to-call to your LinkedIn profile.

Also, if you haven’t read his recent post about Ifbyphone, read it here.

Finally, if you’re new to click-to-call you can read about click to call on our website, sign-up for a free phone-me-now click-to-call account here, or a free developer account here.

Joe the Plumber has been all over the news, and surely this coverage is overwhelming his business. Since last May Ifbyphone was in the news for rescuing an overwhelmed business, we want to have fun exploring 3 ways to do the same for Joe during his 15 minutes of fame.

First, let’s consider Joe’s main business problem–he wants to take advantage of this news coverage to generate more business without drowning in phone calls that won’t improve his bottom line.

Here are 3 potential solutions:

Get a Virtual Receptionist
Joe is going to be getting a lot of phone calls. He probably doesn’t want them all to go to his cell phone. With a virtual receptionist, Joe can professionally greet all callers with an automated message, and then route them based on whether they are a customer needing their sink fixed or a reporter trying to get a story. Additionally, Joe could use an IVR to route calls based on answers to automated questions or a Find Me to forward calls between phones.

Voice Broadcasting To Current Customers
If we were Joe, we’d leverage our 15 minutes of fame by going back to satisfied customers. Joe could send a voice broadcast to his client list saying, “Hi. This is Joe The Plumber. If you’d like to schedule an appointment for me to come by and fix any plumbing problem, press 1 and you’ll be transferred back to me to make an appointment.” This would be a great way for Joe to efficiently generate business and connect with previously satisfied customers.

Geo-Route Calls With Store Locator
Our guess is that Joe only wants phone calls from customers in the region he services. To save time, he could screen out calls from regions he doesn’t serve. For example, calls coming from his area code would go straight to his cell phone, while calls coming from other places (most likely reporters he doesn’t want to talk to) could be routed straight to voice mail, which Joe could check at his earliest convenience.

Joe, if you’d like to learn about additional ways we can save you time, generate leads, and route calls, visit Ifbyphone’s website.

If you thought you could only track online data in Google Analytics, think again. Ifbyphone is excited about this week’s release of our new phone mashup enabling customers to track offline phone call data directly in Google Analytics, alongside website data.

This can be set up in 2 easy steps. First, you enter your Google Analytics account info as shown in the picture below:

Then, for each phone number you want to track you enter some basic information:

Once you save those settings, you’ll start seeing call data in Google Analytics as shown in the image below:

Here are some folks raving about our new Google Analytics phone mashup:
“Ifbyphone made a whopper of an announcement today.”

“Today, Ifbyphone hits it out of the park with a simple and brilliant voice mashup solution”

“In the latest “Gee, that’s cool” Voice 2.0 mashup, Chicago-based Ifbyphone has created a mashup to integrate direct response call date with web advertising info from Google Analytics to enable customers to gauge the overall effectiveness of a lead-generation campaign.”

Build Your Own Phone Mashup

If you have an idea for creating your own phone mashup, please visit phonemashup.com and consider signing up for our free developer accounts.

Over the past few months Ifbyphone has released a number of new features. Here’s a list of some of the goods:

Smart Conference Calling: Set up instant or scheduled conference calls, and optionally set the system to call out to conference attendees rather than waiting for them to call into the conference.  All conference attendees and their statuses can be monitored on a live dashboard by the conference host.

Store Locator: Route calls into a single phone number to the nearest regional or national location based on caller ID or a zip code.  Great for franchises or offices with multiple locations.

Lead Distributor: Distribute leads to on- or off-site agents and determine how calls get answered based on time of day, day of week, caller ID and number of calls previously transferred to a particular phone number.  Assign a weight to each agent so that calls are distributed on a percentage-based system to suit your business.

iPhone Voice Broadcast App: Ifbyphone released an iPhone App over the summer that allows you to easily configure a Voice Broadcast using your iPhone and send it to a unique contact list.  Click here to download it from the iTunes App Store.

You can also read more about our Voice Broadcast App here and here.

For information on all the applications and tools Ifbyphone provides to turn your telephone into a powerful business marketing tool click here to speak to an Ifbyphone agent now.

Stay tuned for updates on new features and solutions.

In celebration of 12 months of Ifbyphone blogging, I’d like to feature an Ifbyphone blog post from each of the past 12 months:

November 2007
Top 10 Tips For Successfully Implementing Click-to-Call On Your Website

December 2007
Create Your Own Web 2.0 Style Click To Call Button

January 2008
Did you ever wonder, “What is a Phone Mashup?”

February 2008
Get Driving Directions To The Nearest Phone Number

March 2008
Top 10 Tips For Creating A Successful Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System

April 2008
Read about the impact of low cost telephone transport

May 2008
An Ifbyphone Success Story Makes It Into The Press

June 2008
Witness the Power of Interactive Voice Response

July 2008
Ifbyphone Introduces a Voice Broadcast iPhone App

August 2008
Adding Phone Functionality To Your LinkedIn Profile

September 2008
Ifbyphone Voice Broadcast App Featured On iTunes App Store

October 2008
Coolest Open Source Technology at Web 2.0 Expo