Ifbyphone Blog

Mike Cooch outlines six basic essentials for a good website and delivers solid information on how to achieve it in this month’s Everon Technology Insider. Rule number six is: “Clear “conversion” path/instructions.”

It’s a sad commentary that ten years after the Internet revolution many websites are their own worst enemies when it comes to conversion. Conversions go down when the number of steps goes up. Click-to-call cuts those steps — especially when there are several choices. As someone once said: “Systems run best when they run downhill.”

It’s a mistake to see the mobile Web as just a “smaller” version of the desktop Web. That mobile Web is really a whole new animal with completely different dynamics. Nothing makes that clearer than this post, Get Clickthrough Rates Through the Roof, by Mike Baker, CEO of Nokia mobile Web marketing subsidiary Enpocket. Baker reports that mobile Web clickthrough rates average 2-6 percent — and gives one example where CTR was an exceptional 8 percent.

The reason? An “engaging” user experience, Baker says. An experience that’s connected to what you’re doing right now.

Think about that. If you’re surfing the Web on your phone, chances are you’re looking for something specific and entertaining — you’re not doing research for your term paper on your phone, right?

Perhaps you’re looking at Daily Show clips or listening to music. Or maybe you want to find a restaurant or a store. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to figure out that someone searching for “Chinese food” on a mobile phone has a higher-than-average probability of clicking on an ad for a nearby Chinese restaurant. To make that experience even more engaging, put a click-to-call in the ad so making reservations and getting directions are as easy as rolling downhill.

In a recent post, Mike Moran at Small Business Answers says that the dynamics of the Web favor small businesses. Not only because the Web levels the playing field, but also because small businesses don’t have the time, money or resources to get tied up in the analysis paralysis that plagues big companies.

Clay Oliver at E-Commerce Times has a post on how “get social” with your market by building communities around your products at social media sites like Facebook.

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.

Even shopping cart businesses can benefit from adding rich voice applications like click-to-call to e-commerce sites.

As I’ve noted before, the lowly phone call gets short shrift in the esoteric art of Web marketing. But often the one thing that would turn a window-shopper into a buyer, or a frustrated subscriber into a happy one, is a piece of information that’s not on the website — for example, “Is the device compatible with my system?” or “Can my doctor call in another refill on my prescription?” FAQs can’t possibly anticipate every question.

It’s not only a question of making it easy for customers to connect — although we all know that anything standing between impulse and action drives down the likelihood of an immediate sale.

When the call comes through your site’s click-to-call, it can carry information along with it — what visitors were looking at when they called or subscriber information. Combine that with a voice survey to get additional information for the customer service agent answering the call. And by integrating voice into the Web application, you capture all this information — and with it, insight for website improvements and better customer service, not to mention those FAQs.

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.

Click-to-Call isn’t just for business. With the ubiquitous mobile handset morphing into an on-the-go media center, click-to-call offers a simple and elegant user-interface for any mobile Web application.

National Public Radio apparently sees it that way.

The recently debuted NPR Mobile Web is a partnership with ten local stations that delivers specially formatted text, pictures and audio - including streaming audio — to Web-enabled mobile phones.

To listen to news stories, or play the interactive version of NPR’s popular quiz game, “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me,” simply click on the “call’ icon and start listening. The free service is carrier- and device-independent.

Think of how useful this could be for GPS navigation or any other service people look for when they’re on the move. We keep saying this: keyboards are for typing - phones are for talking.

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.

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.

Here’s news to make online marketers salivate: A majority of mobile Internet users (three in five) “are more inclined” to buy in response to relevant opt-in ads on their phones, according to a 2008 study conducted by UK-based mobile ad agency Aerodeon. And it’s not just impulse shopping like songs from iTunes. Almost half of regular mobile Internet users reported using the mobile Web to research big ticket purchases like vacations and cars.

Aerodeon reports that slightly more than half of all people who use the Internet on their PCs also use the mobile Internet. When you look at 18 to 24 year-olds, mobile Internet use rises to nearly 80 percent. And two-thirds of all mobile Web users use it to search. All of this presents a huge, unfolding marketing opportunity.

Now, you might assume that the most common interaction between mobile Web visitors and advertisers would be a click-to-call – you are, after all, on a phone. The mobile Internet would seem to be the single most ideal medium for click-to-call.

However, Internet marketers don’t appear to have gotten the message. My brief and admittedly unscientific research – comparing Google hits – indicates that the preferred call to action for a mobile Web ad is a text message. A search on “mobile campaign” and “text messaging” lands 5,470 hits, while “mobile campaign” and “click-to-call” gets a measly 622 hits.

I guess when all you can see is a keyboard, every problem looks like text.

However, there are some voices crying out in the mobile Web marketing wilderness. Joe Whyte of Search Marketing Standard recommends click-to-call for mobile landing pages – right after a “clear and precise call to action.”

Here’s what Whyte has to say:

“The great thing about mobile marketing is that the users are more apt to take advantage of this medium. They are already on the phone so, by providing a click to call option on your mobile site, you’re increasing the odds of that user turning into a lead for your business.”