At Ifbyphone we are all about business. Well, businesses rather. Our product offerings, such as our recent announcement of our Virtual Call Center, help small to medium businesses get the most out of their phones. The thing that really sets us apart is not just that we have great off-the-shelf products but how you can use them together with our API to easily create applications that can have direct impact on your business.
One of the things many businesses can benefit from is the use of demographic data. Businesses can benefit by not only knowing what numbers are calling in, but who the people are associated with those numbers. Because of this we have integrated an option to include reverse lookup data as part of your call reports. Using our Call Distributor product, you can see the reverse lookup as part of your agent panel. If you use CRM software, you can look up the caller there. You can even add history records.
So to show how easy it is to get and use demographic data as part of a call flow, I decided to write a mashup that combines a public API with our Hosted IVR product.
To try it out now – call 866.390.9675.
What the mashup does is pass the phone number you call from to a web page I wrote that checks to see if you are calling from a landline or mobile phone, and attempts to determine the name on the account. From experience, if you call it from a cell phone, it is unlikely that it will be able to determine your name (most demographic data providers do not have great data on mobile phones). But if you call from a residential landline, it should be able to get the name associated with that phone number.
Again, the point of this is simply to show how easy it is to get the demographic data, but if you use your imagination a little bit, you can see the possibilities. The whole project took me a couple hours, but developing the Ifbyphone side of the call took literally minutes. I used the WhitePages.com API. This isn’t the provider Ifbyphone uses for demographic data, but I chose it for this mashup because it was available for free, and was very easy to use. I should also note that the API specifically says it is not intended for business use (at least the free version). The PHP code is about 40 lines long, and is available at PhoneMashup.com.
Very neat feature! Do you have a mashup using any other services? You can also use such a service to perform low level lead validation.
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