Chicago-based ifbyphone continues its relentless campaign to keep the telephone and voice-based communications in the Conversational Commerce mix. In early May, the company introduced a “widget” to make it easy for Help Desk agents using ZenDesk’s core desktop software to manage and respond to voice messages. Last week, the National Association of Realtors, self-described “largest trade organization in America” (and an investor in IfByPhone), announced that its 1.1 million members could avail themselves of a suite of ifbyphone’s services at an exclusive price.

NAR is the organization behind the REALTOR service mark. The package, which is described on this in the REALTOR.org Web site, was designed jointly by the NAR and Ifbyphone. It helps agents optimize their advertising/spending by using call tracking to discover the source of leads. More importantly it uses ifbyphone’s cloud-based voice and call processing resources to serve as a “virtual contact center,” complete with interactive voice response (to screen callers and perform rudimentary call distribution), voice messaging and call forwarding to reach mobile agents.

Since its launch in 2005. IfByPhone has successfully added features and functions to its cloud-based service delivery platform. Eighteen months ago, we posted this story about a three-tiered offering which, at the time, included Telephony API-based voice mashups (for do-it-yourselfers), “Rent-an-App-and-Integrate,” for tech-savvy businesses ready to take a hybrid approach to “Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBPs) and “Stage 3” – which Opus Research now calls “Voice in the Cloud”.

As we noted back then, the competition for Voice in the Cloud comes from the likes of Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and perhaps Microsoft along with the “pure plays” like West Interactive, Voxeo or Angel.com. It is also becoming a domain where enterprise infrastructure providers (especially Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya) are pursuing a “hybrid” approach to supporting multi-channel contact center strategies with “hosted” partners like SpanLink or Teletech. All-in-all, when you include CRM, call tracking, marketing optimization and the other key elements of Conversational Commerce, it is easy to see how “Voice in the Cloud” is foundational to a category of enterprise spending that will exceed $10 billion in 2011.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Telephony, hosted services, IfByPHone, Marketing Automation