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.
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.
The PhoneBoy Blog had a piece about Ifbyphone today. They highlighted the “smart” functionality of the Ifbyphone platform, which allows customers to route people based on specific needs they state when answering questions. Voice Broadcast was also mentioned as a savvy way to keep in touch with warm leads.
Read the blog article here.
We’ve not been shy of discussing the ways Ifbyphone’s smart analytics can help you know more about the way your business works and how customers interact with you and your web site. In an article posted to SmallBizTechnology, Ifbyphone is mentioned as one new company that finds a way to comfortably add a Web presence to your telephony needs. The use of Phone Mashups and the integration of the Web with the old-fashioned telephone can provide a healthy boost to any small or medium-sized business. Read more here on the blog about how Ifbyphone can work for you.
How many times have you picked up the phone today? And how many times did you click on “get more information” or “buy now” today? The answer to the first question is probably 10, 15, or 20 times the answer to the first.
Yet the online marketing universe is so busy studying abstruse statistics about clicks and creating the perfect algorithm for keyword distribution, we’ve overlooked the “old media” paradigm: the telephone.
You could say that click-to-call is the purloined letter of online marketing, hidden right in front of our noses as we search for ever more arcane silver bullets to turn traffic into sales.
Here’s how bad it is: On his Online Business blog, Thomson Chemmanor recently published a list of the top 20 website calls to action for increasing conversions. Click-to-call didn’t make the list. But it’s a big mistake to overlook one of the most familiar connections to customers – and the communications method they’re most likely to use.
Instead, businesses can make themselves more accessible and get better performance from their websites simply by adding well placed click-to-calls. It doesn’t require additional staff, a website redesign or a high-priced SEO agency.
All it takes is a little thought.
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.
Click here to talk to me.
Paying for quality Search Engine Optimization isn’t cheap. Keywords cost money, pay-per-clicks are expensive, and making your way to the top of organic search results can take quite a bit of time. There’s no disputing that these costs are worth it, because they give your business an online presence that is key in driving up sales and recognition. But once you’ve spent the bucks on SEO work, how do you know what’s effective in actually bringing in more sales and revenue? You might know what keywords bring people to your site but do you know what keywords bring paying customers there?
Ifbyphone has recently introduced Keyword and Referral Domain Tracking to work in conjunction with our Smart Click-to-Call feature. Now, Ifbyphone’s analytics will tell you what referral URL a web visitor came from before they entered in their number to call you via a click-to-call. If that URL was a page where they typed in keywords - a search engine like Yahoo! or Google - our analytics will track that keyword for you and tell you what it was and the telephone number, date, and time associated with it. The information is valuable because it lets you know where your best potential customers - the ones who want to speak with you - came from and how they found you.
The implementation process is simple; Ifbyphone will automatically generate the tracking code you need for you. More useful analytics are only a phone call away. Click here to speak to an Ifbyphone sales agent now.
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