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.

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.

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.

The ifbyphone success story continues… “Popcorn retailer finds ingredients to success”.

Here is an excerpt from today’s San Antonio Business Journal:

Garth Dennis, owner of San Antonio based World & Web Marketing, had been brought in a couple of months earlier to help redesign Papa Dean’s Web site. Now he was being called on to help with the spike in call volume that was threatening to put a crimp in the company’s blossoming sales.

Dennis knew just who to call. As a reseller for Skokie, IL. based Ifbyphone, a telephone application company, he was familiar with their products aimed at bringing enterprise level telecommunications technology to small business customers.

Soon, he had Papa Dean’s hooked up with a virtual receptionist platform that routed all the company’s calls through a series of menu items, answering simple questions and routing them to the company’s ecommerce Web site before allowing the few callers who still insisted on speaking to a live person through to the store.

“One morning I was freaking out and almost in tears because I couldn’t keep up with the phone calls. It was insane,” Staglik says. “Ifbyphone came to our rescue.”

Ifbyphone’s virtual receptionist helped to ease the pressure on in-person customer service and gave call-in customers, both existing and prospective, more information, Staglik adds.

Read The Full Article
Learn About The Virtual Receptionist
Visit Papa Dean’s Popcorn
Visit World & Web Marketing

“Who you gonna call?” World & Web Marketing called ifbyphone to rescue Papa Dean’s Popcorn from drowning in its own success.

The ifbyphone virtual receptionist success story was featured today in the San Antonio Express-News. Below is an excerpt:

Staglik had gone to San Antonio-based World & Web to revamp their Web site. Between the walk-in traffic and the Internet orders, Papa Dean’s suddenly was too successful.

“I called up Garth Dennis,” Staglik said, referring to World & Web’s founder. “I said, ‘We’re drowning here. What can you do for us?’.”

That same day, Dennis patched the Web site into Ifbyphone, a Skokie, Ill.-based phone applications service.

“It’s like having a virtual receptionist that is collecting information from your customers,” explained Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro. “So when you get to them, you have additional information and you can handle their order more effectively.”

Staglik said the service rescued the shop’s holiday season. And it gave Papa Dean’s much more information on clients than staff could have acquired under such rush circumstances.

Read the full article
Learn About The Virtual Receptionist
Visit Papa Dean’s Popcorn
Visit World & Web Marketing

VoIP may be thought of mostly as a way of communicating with voice over the Web, but the functionality of it allows for a wide variety of uses.  A new article in VoIP-News.com titled 30 Ways to Use VoIP That You’ve Never Heard Of lists a bunch of possibilities.  Some of my favorties:

Number 4, Do business while you’re in bed
Number 8, Create podcasts
Number 15, Speak in other languages

While Ifbyphone’s hosted suite of voice applications serves many of our clients through out-of-the-box solutions, sometimes it’s necessary to go a little bit further. The Ifbyphone API is fully capable of integrating with nearly any other system or database on the Web. For instance, using several different SurVo’s and a couple of NetGets, you can easily have Ifbyphone “talk” to a database hosted on your external site. Here’s how it would work:

Let’s say you wanted to create an over-the-phone voice application that will read order status information to clients of an online bookstore. The first thing you would do is create a SurVo that included an introduction to the online voice application and a few questions, including the unique account order number of the caller. That SurVo would end there - with a NetGet that sent this information to a database hosted on the bookstore’s end for verification. From there, your database would pass back one of two options. Either the account order number was not verified, and you send the client back to the first SurVo so they can enter in their account order number again (likewise, you could create a separate SurVo specifically for declined account order numbers that prompted someone to re-enter their number). The second pass-back option is that the account number has been verified. From this point on, you can continue to ask questions in the Verified Account SurVo until you need to find status information for a specific order. The Ifbyphone SurVo platform would again send a NetGet to the bookstore’s database, this time looking for a specific order’s status - say, the latest John Grisham novel. The information would get passed back to a new SurVo, which could continue to ask questions and process information until the call ends or the caller requests more information from the bookstore’s database. So, each time a NetGet is used, a new SurVo is accessed.

Click the thumbnail to enlarge the NetGet image.

Also of note are the new security keys that Ifbyphone has added to the platform. In order to enhance security, we have added three types of keys.

• Public Key - this is used with Click-to functions in order to identify your account in a more secure way. We recommend that all accounts use the Public Keys, but only new Ifbyphone accounts are required to do so.
• API Key - this key is used for API calls in the Administrative API. It provides enhanced security for such API functions as Verify-Me-Now, Find Me, SurVo, Reports and more.
• Private Key - this is a shared key used to sign API calls, insuring more security when accessing the API.

One final thing to remind you of: using the Ifbyphone API, it’s possible to download or stream individual or groups of audio files recorded via SurVo and Find Me Recorded Calls. For more information, see the API (Phone Mashup) Develerop’s Guide by clicking here.

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 and the do-it-yourself web site design and hosting company, SiteKreator, have announced a strategic partnership that allows clients to integrate an Ifbyphone Click-to-Call directly into a SiteKreator web site.

Read about it here at Website Magazine.

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.