Ifbyphone Blog

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. 

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.

Our vision, stated here time and again, is that the phone is the best technology that small and medium businesses have at their disposal. Normally it is in the context of using our technology to drive more conversations (using Click-to-call, IVR applications, Virtual Receptionist, Voice Broadcast, etc).

But today we’re taking another angle. Today we’re showing off a demo of a time entry application. There are a number of businesses that have workforces that are primarily in the field. The fact that the main office is in a physically different location than the workforce presents any number of challenges.

The main office wants information from the field (status of jobs, time spent), and they may want to send updates to the field (a change in priorities, a new job, etc). But how do they enable that kind of communication?

You could just have everyone calling each other day, but then no actual work would get done. You could use tablet PCs or SmartPhones with custom built applications. But think of the associated costs. The development cost for this type of application is going to be significant. The developers are going to have to learn a particular mobile phone OS and the associated SDK. Plus, you are going to have to purchase and support the hardware. Then you are going to have to train the users on the device AND the application.

Once you get done with all those costs, it’s clear that the return on investment is going to be negative.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could do all those things just using the phones all your workers already have? Using IfByPhone’s API, you can do just that. We have developed a bare-bones Time Entry application. This application allows you to input an Employee ID, a JobID and start and end time. Here is how the demo works.

An employee would call a phone number, and it will ask them for their employee ID. After validating the Employee ID, it will ask them for the Job number, the starting time, and the ending time. Once the call is complete, IfByPhone posts the results to a webpage run by the company recording the time. Then the data can be thrown into any internal database they want.

This is a pretty bare bones application. But with some customization, you can imagine some pretty powerful possibilities. For construction companies, you could allow a foreman to authenticate himself, and then enter in not only hours worked for his crew, but potentially request new equipment, enter in amount of product used for a given job, etc. If you have technicians in the field, you can use your existing database to direct them to the next job (potentially including step-by-step directions).

So please, try this out. Click the phone to enter some data (look below for valid Employees and Jobs).

Then go see the results pop up in real time here.

The app will ask you for an Employee ID (11111, 22222, 53581, and 49525) and a JobID (11 and 22). I feel the need to emphasize: I am not a graphic designer, and this is simply a demo. So the data page ain’t pretty. And we’re not doing things you want to make sure to do in any real application (user validation, validating the job #, etc). This is simply a demo meant to show how our voice applications can extend to external systems and databases. I’ll be posting the files to the download section of PhoneMashup in a couple days.

Click here to talk to Khyle.

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.

It’s a tough row to hoe for small businesses competing with big companies. But one big reason small businesses may never even get to first base with prospective customers is an un-friendly, un-professional “second class” phone system, according to InfoWorld’s Mike Heck. If anything, small companies need smarter, more sophisticated systems to do the work big companies have big staffs to do. 

Enter the IP-PBX, offering sophisticated functionality that even the largest companies only dreamed not too long ago — and at a price point that the smallest businesses can afford. Or can they?

Heck’s article is about PBX-in-a-box appliances, which, at first blush, sound ideal for small offices. Just plug it into the network and…Well, it’s not that simple.

First, you’ll need new IP phones and you’ll probably have to increase network capacity. Then Heck points out that costs for installing and customizing the PBX can double or triple the initial purchase expense. Oh, and don’t forget training your staff to use the new system and ongoing maintenance. All of this just to add features to phone system that may be making phone calls just fine. 

Sounds to me like telecom’s same old private Idaho — except with different vendors and technology. Many problems, one solution. Namely, the one they sell.

But aren’t we living in the Web 2.0 world? You know, the one where we’re going to get whatever services we need on-demand and delivered through a browser – the Internet as the contemporary equivalent of the pay phone.

Web 2.0 isn’t just about on-demand spreadsheets or business application mashups. It’s also about communications delivered the same way – that’s why the blogosphere was a-twitter last week about Yahoo!’s partnership with VoIP-through-a-browser company Jajah.

In fact, most of us are already using communications-as-a-service without even thinking about it. If you’ve participated in a conference call recently, chances are it’s through a Web-based service. When you needed to hold that conference call, was your first thought to buy a new phone system to do it? So why not apply that same model to other types of services – like Find Me or IVR applications?

Of course, we’re going to toot our own horn here at IfByPhone because for several years we’ve been in the business of delivering voice applications to SMBs via a Web 2.0 –- communications-as-a-service — model.

Sign up and five minutes later you’re setting up call routings and the greetings and menu options you want callers to hear. And it doesn’t matter what kind of phone system you have — or even what kind of phones. Even rotary phones will work.

The point is that first you need to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve.

If you need a new phone system, that’s one thing. But if what you want to do is make sure that calls for tech support go to the right call center depending on the time of day, that’s another problem – one that you can solve with IfByPhone Call Routing.

And the best part of communications-as-a-service is that you don’t have to read through all those product and system evaluations. That should increase productivity significantly.