The branding may need a little work, but cloud-telephony pioneer IfByPhone has formally launched a slew of self-service and routing services under the name “Call Distributor.” The hosted service is positioned as a “virtual call center” for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). IfByPhone is marketing the service based on the evergreen “never miss a call” theme. The foundational elements include call answering, intelligent queuing and routing, interactive voice response and voice messaging. Customers pay for only the minutes they use on the IfByPhone network and platform.

Call Distributor provides Web-based control of agent availability, call management and IVR applications. The businesses can supply their own prompts and establish rules for queue management and call routing. As a basic feature, callers can “opt out” of a queue and be routed to an IVR message or voicemail system to leave a message. Each agent’s dashboard will display the results of a reverse look up of the originating number and can also incorporate information from Salesforce.com. The management dashboard displays key performance statistics and rudimentary analytics.

Competition for cloud-based customer care is heating up. But, as Angel.com and a few others have learned, SMBs are an elusive market. The “no CapEx” and pay-as-you-go approach tends to play well, but it is always coupled with an inherent need for initial hand-holding and ongoing support. Direct competition comes today from Jaduka and eventually from the likes of Google Voice.

IfByPhone is no newcomer to this market space and has already offered such services as virtual phone numbers with advanced routing, Hosted IVR, Voice Broadcasting, Call Tracking, Find Me, Click-to-Call, Google Analytics® Integration. We’re pleased to see them packaging a virtual contact center product for SMBs and note that they are doing so without invoking the “Unified Communications” mantra.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Virtual Contact Center, Collaborative Customer Care, Cloud-based telephony