Ifbyphone Blog

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.

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.

Click here to talk to me.

The integration of Jajah’s network into the Yahoo Messenger platform signals a continuation of the movement of telephone transport from traditional PSTN networks to open VOIP transport. These new voice and data networks allow the user to bring their own device and access the world of telephony from new and exciting places.

Many of you may still remember when the telephone company provided all of your phones. The latest VOIP initiatives just continue the transition from telephone company owned devices to a device of your choice, by providing a device agnostic transport medium. Most telephone users now have access to open VOIP transport alternatives that are changing the pricing of transport. As transport costs continue to fall telephone users will obtain a new freedom in how that utilize telephone minutes. In a world of transport costs that are no longer a factor, users will want powerful applications that maximize the utility of these voice and data highways.

Let’s break this down a bit with an example. Why have railroads failed in America and prospered in the rest of the world? The American highways were much too good, gas prices where too low, and the price of an automobile was a reasonable percentage of the typical Americans income. This lead to the creation of the largest automobile companies in the world. (These same companies are now failing because of a combination of historical mistakes and changes to the relationships between transport costs and personal income.)

The new VOIP networks are the highways of telephony. The traditional telephone companies are the railroads. Telephone Application Platforms such as Ifbyphone are the new automobile manufacturers. The Ifbyphone Telephone Application Platform delivers applications over low cost VOIP networks, affordable by any business, that leverage the power of low cost telephone communications in any business, at any location, any time of the day.

A link to the Information Week article on the Jaja Yahoo deal follows:

Yahoo Outsources Messenger Voice Service To Jajah

As previously mentioned in this space, we recently announced our PhoneMashup initiative aimed at getting developers involved with our product. Every day we’re getting more developers signing up and doing interesting things with our services.

We want to make sure we’re providing the best support we can to our developer friends. So to that end, you will be seeing a lot more content. You’ll see more blog posts here related to developer issues. And we will regularly be posting new sample applications to the files section, as well as writing about them in the forums.

Finally, we’re on Twitter. You can follow us by going here. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us a question by using @ifbyphone. We’ll be monitoring the account regularly. You can also follow me (Khyle) too.

PS: If you don’t know what Twitter is, it’s a social networking tool similar to Instant Messaging. Their FAQ should help, and Jennifer Laycock wrote a great series about it as well.

Click here to talk to me.

At EComm 2008 our CEO, Irv Shapiro announced our new initiative aimed at allowing developers easy access to our technology (see mentions at Information Week, MacWorld, Thomas Howe, VOIP Weblog, and VOIP News). We are offering free accounts to developers so they can look at our technology, and see how easy it is to use our services. To signup for your free account, head over to PhoneMashup.com and click on the Free Mashup Account link to sign up.

Feel free to call me if you have any questions.

We talk a lot about the concept of mashups around here. What that really means to me is that people are starting to integrate voice into every day applications.

There simply is no better way to keep in better touch with your clients and prospects than by talking to them. The most successful companies will be the ones who consider voice as an integral part of their overall communication strategy. Certainly there are places where Email or websties or RSS or other means are a great way to keep in touch. But with the technology available today, you have the ability to use all methods in any given situation.

For example. Let’s say you have an overloaded HR department, and you’re going through a hiring push. You want to pre-screen applicants to see which meet some basic requirements. In the past, you could have people directed to a website where they could answer the questions. Today, you can choose any number of ways to get that information. By creating a simple Survo (our powerful and simple IVR like functionality) you now have any number of ways to gather that information.

You can automate outbound calls to the applicants. You can send an Email with a link to the web site and a link that would allow them to answer via the phone. You can tell them to call an 800# if you’d like. The point is you have much greater flexibility. YOU can choose how you want to be in touch.

Click here to call me.

Creating an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) can be as simple as recording a few prompts, telling a customer to press one or two, and routing the caller to an operator at the end of the call. But to create an effective, seamless, and confusion-free IVR that allows you to use a computer where a live person once was needed requires more thought and planning. It doesn’t need to be a painful process, but careful outlining of what you want to do and, more importantly, what you want a customer to do will ensure an IVR that is not just another component to your business but an essential feature of your business’s communication structure.

So, you want to create an IVR to expedite telephone product sales, manage a customer service department, or develop a phone directory for a 100-employee company (or a 5-employee company). Now what?

1. A good IVR is short and to the point – no unnecessary questions or prompts. The first thing you need to do is think about what the most important pieces of information are that you want to deliver to your customers or that you need from them. A good way to manage this process is to think about the five most important prompts or questions you want to play for or ask of your customers, and begin there. Then, as time goes and as you continue to watch how the IVR is working for you, you can add or remove those prompts and questions that do not add to the overall quality of the IVR. Less is more. Start with a few prompts and build as your employees or customers get more comfortable with it.
2. Create an effective opening prompt. Be brief, concise, and polite – watch out for 30-second introductions or too many multi-syllabic words, and make sure you appear grateful that the employee or customer is calling in to your IVR.
3. Have the system refer to itself as “I.” Customers prefer to hear a first-person IVR rather than a generic “system.”
4. If you have an IVR that is longer than four prompts, let a caller know what they can expect from the system immediately. Customers don’t like it when they can’t see the end of the tunnel. Either have the IVR share how many questions and which they are answering or provide some glimpse of the number of questions or time it will take to complete the IVR in your introduction.
5. Take advantage of Ifbyphone’s speech-recognition software and give customers the option to traverse the IVR by either using touch-tone buttons or speaking their answers. Make sure they know that speech is an option.
6. If you decide to allow speech-recognition answers, make it clear what the answer needs to be and use two or three syllable responses so as not to confuse the customer, or the system. Answers of a couple words can work well because they give the system a more precise speech target to search for.
7. Be concise, and make sure that you use the same language to describe the same nouns or processes throughout the IVR. An article on the Ifbyphone blog titled “How To Make Prompts Consistent” does an excellent job of explaining just how to do this. Break down the different “names” (what you would call something) and “actions” (something you ask a customer to do), and ensure that there is a consistency throughout. If you tell a customer to “enter two” at one place and to “press three” in another, you’re not being consistent. Likewise, if you call something a “menu” in one prompt, you don’t want to refer to it as a “message” later on.
8. Think about the Barge-In Factor. On the Ifbyphone system, you have the option to Allow Barge-In or not. If your customers will be interacting with an IVR in a loud place, the background noise may affect the voice recognition system, and you may not want to allow barge-in. However, if you expect most customers to be at home or in an office, then barge-in is a useful feature to speed up an IVR.
9. Think about the Touch Tone Only Factor. If you select this, the system won’t accept any voice responses, only numbers entered in on a touch tone phone. It’s another useful tool for customers who have a lot of background noise, but also a convenient way to simplify an IVR. Giving customers the option to say or enter in their responses isn’t always necessary; sometimes the simple press of a button will do. If you turn on “Touch Tone (DTMF) only” and Allow Barge-In at the same time, you can create an IVR that is very quick and easy to navigate.
10. Create an option to always allow customers to access human help and let them know about it. Depending on the type of IVR you are setting up, you may want to keep in mind that people become frustrated, annoyed, and may eventually hang up if they cannot access human help when the IVR doesn’t appear to suit their needs.

We recently released a new feature that I wanted to mention here.  Now you can publish the results of your IfByPhone Survo calls on the web.  The entire process takes about 3 minutes to set up.   This feature will allow you to give a URL to your clients so they can log in and see how their campaign is working in real time.

Let’s say you are in the LeadGen business.  You can now use our Survo to capture leads in any number of ways.  If you are using a direct mail campaign, include an 800# that points to your custom Survo.  Email campaign? Capturing lead information off the a web site? Link to the Survo - have the user enter their phone number and initiate that conversation right now.   Do you have a list of people that are interested in your services?  Use our outbound broadcast to call these people.

We already know that using a Survo as a way to capture any kind of information has some major advantages over other methods.  First, it happens in real time, and you don’t have to be as concerned with the accuracy and completeness of the data (you can check that as part of the Survo).   Also, you can give qualified leads (or all leads if you want) the option to talk to someone right away.

No more losing leads to bad phone numbers or people that are difficult to reach.  If the prospect is ready to give you the information you want, it is in your best interest to get that from them right now.  If you wait, you might lose the prospect.

With our new Publish feature, not only are you going to gather the information right now, but as a LeadGen firm, you can give your customers access to it…right now.

Click here to call me.

Every minute of every day, somewhere, someone is pounding on their keyboard, or screaming at their computer, “How do I contact the people behind this web site, or this blog?” Too many web sites make it difficult for viewers to connect.

Later that same day you might become frustrated because the emails you sent to a business associate or friend landed in the black hole of a SPAM folder. Or maybe you were away from your computer and the screen on your phone is just too small to read, but you need to check on the delivery of the sofa you just ordered. If you call the sofa company they will put you on hold, forever. You just want to know the date of the delivery - why should this be so hard?

All of these examples are easily solved by better utilizing the everyday, plain old telephone. Telephones are everywhere today, at home, at work, in our pockets. Phone mashups combine the intimacy of the telephone with the efficiency of the web. In the examples above, you could provide a web site visitor with a Click-to-Call that connects the viewer’s telephone to your telephone. You could use an automated Voice Broadcast to send messages to your customers. With an Interactive Voice Response system, the sofa company could provide you with instant customer service while saving on staff and reducing costs.So why doesn’t every small business, web site creator, or blog author integrate their web world with their viewers’ telephones?

While the VoiceXML and CCXML standards have driven down the cost of custom IVR, these solutions are still too complex and expensive for many independent developers and small businesses. Many Click-to-Call solutions now available in the marketplace tend to be limited in flexibility. Phone mashups require flexibility.Phone mashup APIs need to be usable by any web developer with basic web form coding skills. In essence, the phone mashup API should replace web forms with voice forms.Ifbyphone provides a very flexible family of APIs (we call them Ifbyphone Glue) that includes the ability to:

• Initiate a traditional Click-to-Call between two parties
• Initiate a Click-to-Virtual Receptionist
• Initiate a Click-to-VoiceMail
• Initiate a Click-to a full featured interactive voice response system
• Initiate a Click-to a Find Me with full recording capabilities

Ifbyphone APIs also support the scheduling of voice broadcast messages, reminder calls, and wake up calls.In addition to initiating telephone connections from a web site, the communications facilitated by the Ifbyphone hosted platform may be activated from a telephone call. When someone calls into an Ifbyphone provisioned telephone number their call can be:

• Routed based on the caller ANI (caller ID)
• Routed based on the time of day and day of week
• Routed to a voice mail account
• Routed to a find me
• Routed to a virtual receptionist
• Routed to an interactive voice response application (IVR)

Ifbyphone IVR applications can be thought of as voice forms. If you know how to build a web site that uses a form to collect information, processes the information, and then displays another form, you know how to build a phone mashup.

SurVo Voice Forms** are created at the Ifbyphone web site and then invoked by an API or telephone call. A voice form consists of prerecorded or text-to-speech prompts and questions that are played for a caller, and then allows their responses to be recorded or converted into text.

When the caller reaches the end of a voice form, the Ifbyphone platform passes control to a web page you create. This web page can be hosted on any server, coded in any language and secured or unsecured. Your web page will receive the data collected via the telephone dialog (voice form) as a post or get in the same way you would collect information from an HTML form.

Once you have the data you can write it to a database, use it to query another web source, or process it in just the same way you would process information collected from any other form.  After processing, your web page outputs an XML file which tells the Ifbyphone platform what to do next. The next step can be another voice form, a find me, a virtual receptionist or even to just hang up the telephone. Data provided by your web page can be read to the caller or can be used to determine the next set of questions asked.

There is no limit to the number of voice forms or the number of transitions between your web pages and the Ifbyphone infrastructure.

To summarize, the Ifbyphone Glue (API) supports the combination of information accessible from the web for presentation via voice on any telephone.  All Ifbyphone services use real telephones and do not rely on desktop computer based VOIP services.

To learn more just take a look at the Ifbyphone Glue (API) documentation.

Ifbyphone Glue (API) Documentation

All Ifbyphone Documentation

**The name SurVo comes from the fact that initially this technology was built for creating customer surveys.

While there are many telephone technology conferences each year, two stand out. VON and eComm. VON is where the business professionals in the voice and telephony industries go to make deals. eComm is where the technologists go to innovate.

Prior to this year Etel (the predecessors to eComm) was an O’Reilly sponsored conference designed to provide a forum for people working in the emerging telephony technologies to get together, learn and network. When O’Reilly decided to drop the Etel conference a ground swell of discussion in the telco world lead Lee S Dryburgh to put his day job on hold and facilitate eComm as a replacement. As stated on the eComm site:

“eComm is the venue for those interested in the radical transformation of the trillion dollar telecommunications industry. It has already started down the path that the homebrew computer took three decades ago. Just as democratized computation gave birth to the computer industry, eComm is tracking, highlighting and promoting the people and technologies driving this new wave of democratization.

eComm brings out the visionaries, emergent technologies, real-world startups, cutting-edge academic projects, views from the incumbent telecom players; garage based hacks and stirs required policy debates to create the ultimate three-day conversation.

The story of the decentralization of communications innovation has past the second chapter which was VoIP. It is now regarded as a building block only. As a standalone service it is both uninspiring and unlikely to be highly profitable.”

The Ifbyphone phone mashup API is an ideal vehicle for developers looking to build creative web to phone applications. At my eComm 2008 talk I will describe the Ifbyphone architecture used to drive down the costs of sophisticated IVR applications while making them accessible to any web developer or small business.

Information about eComm 2008