Khyle

JumpForward & IfByPhone in partnership

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.

Tying things together

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.

Customer Service is a community

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.

What is Voice 2.0?

In the last couple days, there has been bad news for a couple Voice 2.0 startups, Jangl and TalkPlus. There are people commenting on what this means for Voice 2.0: has the bubble burst? What does the future hold for Voice 2.0 companies?

I feel bad for the people at Jangl and TalkPlus. More or less, I've been in their shoes before. I know how it feels, and it's not pleasant.

But second, Voice 2.0 is poorly defined. I consider IfByPhone to be a Voice 2.0 company in at least some ways. But we are vastly different than both of these companies above and many other companies under the Voice 2.0 umbrella. IfByPhone is sitting in the middle of a convergence of several different marketplaces, Click-to-call, Call routing, call tracking, voice broadcast, and IVR being just a few of them.

So, I for one, am going to suggest that we stop calling every new telephony feature or company or widget Voice 2.0.  Just becuase AT&T doesn't offer it to their residential customers doesn't make it part of the next wave.

For IfByPhone, I think the most appropriate term is Telephony Application Provider or TAP (I didn't come up with the term, but I think it fits). I think it's pretty clear that there will be a huge marketplace for companies large and small to integrate voice into business processes and existing business applications. And IfByPhone will be there at the forefront of that marketplace.

IfByPhone around the web

I wrote a guest post on VOIPSupply's blog. The post is about the Voice 2.0 market, how TAPs (Telephony Applicaiton Providers) are changing the market, and how VOIP companies in particular are able to take advantage of the functionality we provide.

Also, our Facebook app was reviewed:

Somewhat Frank

EasyasVoip

And both Start Henshall and Andy Abramson weigh in on Irv's post about AOL + Jajah.

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Squawk Box PodCast

Our CEO was the guest on the SquawkBox podcast hosted by Alec Saunders and Dan York.

It was a very informative interview about what we do, and how we think about the marketplace. Please check it out here.

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