Believe me, it is nice to see voice conversations being integrated with social media (like the Vivox app on Facebook). However, I’m concerned about the overall user experience arising from the @call @username service. I’m going to defer to Phweet originator Stuart Henshall’s commentary the issues of potential latency in call set up, as well as the vulnerability to something akin to phone spam. But for now, I’m very glad to see that the largely screen-based world of social media is rediscovering the phone call.

Today Voxeo revealed that the IMified platform is able to monitor Twitter “Tweets” for the mention of an enterprise’s brand, products or services and respond in kind. More likely, the Twitter-bots will detect when customers or prospects have questions, comments or purchase intents that can be addressed by live agents. If it is a partially formed query, the bots can elicit more detail before bringing the agent into the mix. For instance, if it spots a complaint about a flat-screen TV from a major manufacturer, it can ask the disgruntled customer to provide the model number and date of purchase before engaging a technician in what could be an expensive trouble-shooting exercise.

The beauty of Twitter, according to Dan York, Voxeo’s Director of Conversations, is that it has the potential to take the IVR (interactive voice response) unit out of the critical path and enable customers to define the way that they want to communicate with their vendors. It passively “listens” and then responds in kind.

It is early days for the new platform and Voxeo’s mission initially is to put tools in the hands of developers that enable them to add Twitter to the self-service mix. That means providing code to download, developer workshops and sample bots to illustrate the value of the new service. Use cases will follow and, given Twitter’s high profile of late, we expect there to be a lot of interest.

York sees the greatest value to gravitate toward national or global companies who are looking for ways to scale up efforts to monitor and respond to the fast-growing stream of Tweets. As he observes, “If we can answer the questions before they get to a human, we are providing better and more cost effective customer service.” Voxeo started with IVR and then added all the other media and provide ways for application developers to enable their clients to interact with customers in the manner that they choose.