Ifbyphone Blog

In a new post, mobile advertising guru Andrew Grill highlights U.K.-based Yell.com’s new mobile map-based “yellow pages” services.  The free-to-use (ad supported) service takes advantage of both browser and phone capabilities to offer a true Web 2.0/Voice 2.0 experience — for example, every number is click-to-call, and you can add contact info automatically to address books and send it to someone else as a text message.  Unfortunately for North Americans, Yell Group’s U.S. service — Yellowbook.com — doesn’t yet offer the service. 

There is a great deal of value in allowing your users the ability to contact the right people, at the right time with the right information.  One of the great benefits of social media is that it allows you to get in contact with people who you are interested in.  I can go to Facebook and keep up with the lives of former classmates, current friends and even business associates.  I can go to Twitter and participate in conversations as disparate as SEO, fatherhood or the stunning sweep of the Cubs by the first place White Sox this past weekend.  There are a great deal of other social media sites that have found niches in keeping people connected.

Generally speaking, most of the communication that these sites facilitate is electronic.  Email, posting on message boards or walls, instant messaging.  For many types of conversations, those forms of communications work really well.  But there are certain conversations that do not lend themselves to email or IM or board posts.  There are certain conversations that really require a direct human-to-human call.

One of our partners is JumpForward, a social media site that specializes (among other things) in assisting athletes to get in contact with colleges that may be interested in recruiting them. Last week we announced the partnership, check out this video:

JumpForward is using our technology to allow athletes and coaches work together more effectively.  If you are involved in organized athletics of any kind, I’d highly recommend you spend a few minutes on thier site.

Without getting *too* philosophical, I think JumpForward is really at the cutting edge of communications.  It’s nice that I can go to my Facebook page and see that a friend loves WallE or hates the new ColdPlay album.  But I think there is untapped potential in hooking up people who need to talk to each other at the right time, in the right way.  I think that it’s a direction we’re headed, albeit slowly.

In the mean time, we’re happy to be at the forefront with JumpForward.

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Interested?  Click here and I’ll give you an immediate call back.

Venture Beat reports that American Express customers can now take Reardon Commerce’s personal concierge with them when they leave home. It illustrates the converging of several trends: context-centric application mash-ups, multiple ways of interacting — voice, SMS, email, Web. This could be taken to the next level with a smart interactive voice application at the end of the click-to-call to increase the efficiency at the other end — think about changing travel plans — and to eliminate typing on tiny keyboards.

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.

My son just finished a term paper on the history of computers. One of the more interesting details he unearthed in the course of his research is this 1980 remark by an anonymous IBM employee: 

“Why on earth would you care about the personal computer? It has nothing at all to do with office automation. It isn’t a product for big companies who use ‘real’ computers.” 

I was reminded of the scene in the movie Casblanca where the Nazi commander, Major Strasser, refers to Rick Blaine as a “bumbling American.”  Police Captain Renault relies, “I wouldn’t underestimate American bumbling, Major. I was with them when they bumbled into Berlin in 1918.”

Looking back from our 21st century vantage point, it’s clear that the PC, and then the public World Wide Web, caused sea-changes in culture, business and technology that almost completely displaced the old world order of monolithic mainframes. 

But paradigm-changing as the Web was, our understanding of it is also based on some unexamined assumptions. One of them is that the interface with the Web is necessarily typed text. Just as the personal computer toppled accepted wisdom about interacting with computers, new ideas about Web interaction could just as easily depose today’s model. After all, people talked long before they wrote.

As you may guess, people are already pursuing those new ideas. Some of those people are in IBM’s India Research Lab.

The company’s recently announced mobile Web initiative includes a “Spoken Web” project that aspires to nothing less than transforming “how people create, build and interact with e-commerce sites on the World Wide Web using the spoken word instead of the written word,” according to the April 21, 2008 press release. “The Spoken Web is the World Wide Web in a telecom network, where people can host and browse “VoiceSites,” traverse “VoiceLinks,” even conduct business transactions, all just by talking over the existing telephone network.”

If you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense, if only because are 3.3 billion mobile phones in the world, according to the research firm Informa - about three times the number of PCs in use, (Forrester Research estimate). But there are other compelling arguments for the Spoken Web. 

Using the Web on a PC requires learning how to interact with a computer, operating system, browser and keyboard. There are many people in the world for whom this is a barrier - and not just because a computer might be beyond their means economically. Some can’t negotiate the complexity of setting up a computer, and some are handicapped and can’t type, but they’re all perfectly capable of asking a question.

We go to the Web all the time to find don’t need require the processing power - or baggage - of a PC. For example, weather conditions, making appointments, or coupons and ads. For example, why should you have to be PC- and networking-savvy just to look up a map or find out what’s on sale at the market?

So the next time you look something up on the Web, think about how simple it would be if you could just ask your phone. 

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.

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.”

Only a handful of e-marketers include customer satisfaction in their Web marketing metrics, according to Antone Gonsalves at Intelligent Enterprise. This data, from a recent eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit survey, shows just how far Web marketing can detour around the reality-based world.

It doesn’t take a rocket to understand that customer satisfaction drives that all-important metric, conversion rate – or that without it, conversion rates nose-dive.

While online surveys are useful for gauging customer satisfaction, they force answers into predetermined boxes – they’re black and white. Adding voice to the online marketing mix adds the Technicolor of inflection, phrasing and context to build a full color picture of customer satisfaction.

For example, “I’m working on my car and I need to remove a bolt from the carburetor. I had to look all over for the right wrench and then when I finally found the automotive wrenches, there was hardly any information,” supplies insight about how customers expect to navigate your store or site — and why they might abandon before buying. Plus, it delivers context information for keyword optimization and ad buys.

The familiar click-to-call supplies the mechanism for smoothly incorporating voice into the online mix. Here’s how:

Ask customers to participate in a brief survey by simply clicking on a phone icon on the page or in an email. This connects them directly to a voice-directed survey that includes multiple choice as well as open-ended questions. While you have them on the phone, you can even immediately route unhappy customers to a service representative, pre-briefed from the survey results.

You can also reuse the results to add customer comments to your website for a more compelling testimonial. Let’s face it, hearing and talking is our natural communication medium, not reading and writing.