IfByPhone: Connecting SMBs With Customers
IfByPhone provides a number of different tools that businesses can use to help them bring in more sales. They provide services such as: “smart” click-to-call, smart call routing (including scheduled-based call routing), interactive voice response services, voicemail, voice broadcast services, and more.
A lot of services offer click-to-call functionality. The way it generally works is that there’s a button on a web site. You click that button, enter your phone number, and you are connected into a switchboard–the same switchboard as if you called the company’s 800 number. What good is that?
The way IfByPhone’s Smart Click To Call functionality works is that you can ask questions beyond the phone number. Instead of routing to a general location, you can route a call to a specific location based on the information collected, the time of day, or other criteria. The person answering the call can already have some information about you when they pick up.
Another cool IfByPhone feature is a voice broadcast system. Let’s say you’ve got a number of clients that you’ve done business with over the past several months. You can record a message–in your own voice–that is then sent to your customers in an automated fashion. What’s neat about this is that you can call them into action (e.g. to set up an appointment with my assistant Jody, press 2 now).
There is certainly the possibility that this feature could be used fradulently–think a nefarious individual using this to scam unsuspecting people into thinking they are their bank. IfByPhone screens all customers over the phone before providing them access to their services. While it’s obviously not foolproof, it does eliminate a lot of hucksters whom would rather keep their identity a secret.
What is particularly interesting about IfByPhone is that it does not take a rocket scientist to deploy any or all of these features. It’s all possible to set these features up through web pages. Unlike other players in this space, it doesn’t require anything more complex than coding an HTML form to integrate IfByPhone’s services into your web site.
