All Voxeo Blogs Feed

Tropo powers Speak2Leads

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:20 +0000

Speak2Leads’ (S2L) proposition is simple, respond immediately to a customer lead using voice powered by Tropo, with up to six in total carefully timed call attempts. 78% of all sales go to the first company to return a prospect’s call. Sammy James the founder and CEO of Speak2Leads explained, “A Kellogg study on Lead Response Management (LRM) revealed the odds of connecting with a lead increases by 100 times if attempted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead is generated. And the odds of converting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes increases by 21 times. Put simply, using Speak2Leads can triple a company’s sales.” The core of the business is a call, which is sales people talking to leads at the right time for the lead, hence Speak2Leads uses Tropo to connect those sales people to leads as fast as possible, generally in under 30 seconds. This can raise the leads contacted from a typical 40% to over 90%, more leads contacted means more sales, more leads contacted first means more sales, a doubling and in some cases a tripling of sales can be achieved.

When Speak2Leads receives a lead; which can come from many sources, for example the lead fills in a form on the internet with their contact details; S2L’s automated lead response application then calls the appropriate sales person for that customer, the sales person hears an announcement and is prompted to press 2 to speak to the lead. This is all powered by Tropo. Getting the sales person and lead to connect is more complex than this scenario suggests, and the service must be integrated into the business processes of S2L’s customer to make the lead response management measureable. Solving this hard real-world problem is the competitive advantage of the S2L platform. S2L works with the leading CRM’s, email service providers, landing page and marketing automation platforms, such as Salesforce.com, Unbounce, HubSpot, InfusionSoft and MailChimp.

Speak2Leads has been in operation for 7 years, in building the business they have experienced a number of telephony platform providers upon which they’ve run their business. “We need the very best Telephony network we can buy,” said Sammy, “and Voxeo Labs is in our experience the best network on the market. It’s the lowest Total Cost of Ownership because it’s just got to work, no ifs, ands, or buts.” Sammy explained, “Voice is complex, calls can drop when you consider the computers, switches, wire and fiber-optic cables involved and when they do you need; a partner that knows voice networks inside out and will respond fast and furious to identify the source of the problem and get it fixed. Also we’re adding features every 4 to 6 weeks, hence we need a platform and a partner that can work with us to meet our specific customer needs. Voxeo Labs provides the world class support and advice so we’re the best we can be.”

Sammy has impressive plans for the expansion of Speak2Leads. “International is tough given the mobile call charges, we’re exploring with Voxeo Labs how Phono and other options can help us expand our business faster into international markets. We’re happy to white-label, and looking to expand internationally through partners as well as directly. Voxeo Labs is proving to be an important partner in helping us grow our business.” Sammy’s advice on his experiences in building this business are, “Keep it simple, don’t disrupt the customer’s existing business complement it, zero training required, no IT required, measure, measure and measure. Using Tropo enables us to seamlessly insert our value into what businesses are doing today, with a reliable and highly programmable platform, and unmatched support in the industry.”

Meet Voxeo Labs at the Future of Advanced Communications Technology Panel at the RCS Summit during CTIA 2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:45 +0000

During the CTIA 2013 conference will be the RCS Summit – Enabling OTT-like services while preparing for HTML5 & WebRTC organized by Informa. Vish Nandlall, CTO and VP Strategy & Market Development, will moderate the Future of Advanced Communications Technology panel. And on the panel will be our own Jason Goecke of Voxeo Labs; expect a frank and forthright discussion on the challenges and opportunities RCS (Rich Communications Services) and WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) bring to service providers and their customers, both consumer and enterprise.

Jason Goecke and Kile Brown will be at CTIA on May 22^nd in Las Vegas, please contact us if you’d like to meet to chat about Communications APIs , WebRTC and Web Communications, and the future of communication services.

And by the way, Jose de Castro of Voxeo Labs gave a WebRTC workshop at the IMS World Forum. Quoting Larry Baziw from Rogers, “Super valuable both from a level set and also a great cross section of the emerging WebRTC ecosystem and solutions.” And from Wilfred Nicoll from Telefonica, “Thanks for an excellent workshop, it was by far the best workshop I’ve ever attended.”

Shifting to an on-demand Partnership Model: The Voxeo Referral Partner Program

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:16:06 +0000

Historically, partnering with a new vendor is a decision made after a significant amount of consideration due to the commitment required in becoming a partner. This commitment often means switching to an entirely different product line, retraining sales and technical resources to sell, support and develop on a new platform and can sometimes mean cutting a large check to the vendor as a partnering fee.

A business must be nimble enough that they can quickly shift directions to meet their customer’s changing needs. When these needs involve a solution the partner doesn’t already offer, an agile, flexible vendor is a key component to ensuring the partner can deliver exactly what the customer needs.

Voxeo knows that we are in the midst of a changing communications landscape and that there are fresh challenges facing businesses who want to add new and improved customer interaction channels. The days of IVR being used as a simple, “Press one, press two,” call routing system are on their way out the door as IVR can address a significant number of customer self-service needs with applications crossing over to new channels like mobile, Twitter and SMS.

A solutions provider may want to add these channels to their customer solution set, but under the old ways of partnering, would be looking at a long term, expensive commitment in working with a new vendor. Voxeo’s Referral Partner program has changed that aspect dramatically, offering a partner program without entry costs, lead minimums or sales quotas.

We know that your goal is the same as ours, which is to provide customers the best solutions to make their customers happy. When one of your customers or contacts needs a solution Voxeo can provide, you can refer them to Voxeo and determine the level of involvement you prefer to have with the opportunity. This level determines the commission percentage and allows you to refer the lead and walk away, or stay engaged and leverage our sales team’s expertise in selling multi-channel applications.

It’s a refreshing way to partner, available to you on demand and when it makes sense to bring in Voxeo’s best-in-class communication solutions.

Do you see the new partnership model as we do: Fluid and easily adaptable to individual business opportunities – or do you think there are improvements that could make this partnership model even more effective? I invite you to take a look at our Referral Partner page and leave a comment on this post with your thoughts on what the future of partnership looks like.

Join Us for Venture Lounge, May 21, 2013!

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:24:39 +0000

Join us Tuesday, May 21, 2013, from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm, for Venture Lounge, a private networking event for high-tech entrepreneurs, developers, designers, social media professionals and investors here at the industrial-hip Town Square in Voxeo’s awesome downtown Orlando headquarters on the 10th floor of the Plaza.

Check out the agenda:

6:00 pm: Doors Open
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm: Networking
8:00 pm: Event Concludes

Did you notice that there are no boring presentations? Plus, this event is free of service-providers, job-seekers and other solicitors. Just grab a cold drink and enjoy some food, music and unlimited networking with Florida’s high-tech movers and shakers in a very cool atmosphere.

Are you ready to register for this FREE event? Official registration is on the Florida Technology Journal’s website, but you can RSVP on Facebook to see who else is attending and invite friends.

Introducing Voxeo CXP 13

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:45:34 +0000

You may have seen the previews.

You may have heard it won prizes before it was even released.

You may have wondered what all the buzz was about.

Well, now you have a chance to experience it for yourself.

One area of focus in building CXP 13 has been the mobile web channel – but there are also many broad-ranging new functionalities in it that serve other channels just as well. In this post, I’ll only have space to sample some of them, but in the coming weeks we’ll follow up with articles on individual topics that go more in-depth.

If you have worked with previous versions of CXP (formerly VoiceObjects), one of the biggest structural changes you’ll notice is that the CXP Developer environment now supports channel-centric editing. Instead of dealing with all available object properties all the time, the IDE now adjusts to the context you’re working in: grammars and audios when working on IVR, images and widget when working on web, and so on. Some things, such as backend integration, are intentionally the same throughout.

The effect of channel-centric editing in CXP Developer is a better focus on the tasks and settings at hand, leading to greater developer efficiency in building and adjusting applications. CXP’s unique ability to serve multiple channels based on a single, integrated application definition is of course still fully available, and in fact stronger than ever – since you can now see very quickly what differs by channel, and what remains the same.

With the enhanced jQuery Mobile-based driver for the mobile web channel, you can easily build appealing, user-friendly applications that work on practically all current mobile devices. Sometimes, though, you may want to go beyond even what the plentiful standard configuration options offer – by providing customized HTML templates. The new Layout object makes this easier than it was before, with object type-specific entries as well as integrated XML highlighting, editing and validation. Furthermore, your custom definitions are now an integral part of the application as you move it from development to test to production – no need to maintain separate files that must be kept in synch.

Web applications use image resources in much the same way that IVR applications use audios – so it’s only fair that we’ve added an Image object to allow these to be referenced and managed in the same way.

User input in web applications is provided by means of various input elements such as text boxes, drop-downs, radio buttons, etc. – often referred to as widgets in Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). So this is also the name we have chosen for a new object type that allows you to configure this specific interaction. CXP 13 supports a total of 20 different widgets, ranging from a humble text box all the way to dynamically configured graphical lists.

The Kitchen Sink sample application that ships with CXP 13, and which we’ll take a closer look at in one of our next blog posts, provides usage examples for all of these widget types.

When building web applications you unfortunately always need to keep that tiny fraction of users in the back of your mind who will attempt to break or hack your app – for example by trying to inject markup code or SQL statements. CXP 13 provides you with multiple layers of OWASP-compliant protection here, from the scanning of parameter values to cleaning functions. CXP Developer comes with a tutorial application that explains the risks and how to address them, and we’ll also go into more detail in a future blog article.

CXP’s object-based approach has many advantages in terms of rapid development and easy re-use of components previously built. Especially when working with Expression objects, however, it could also be a pain in the neck since for nested “sub-functions” used as arguments you always needed to build additional objects and link them in. No more!

CXP 13 gives you the option of converting arguments into embedded functions (and vice versa). This makes it easy to encapsulate “inner” functions that are only needed in a single spot, while of course you can still re-use blocks that occur in several places.

It even automatically generates a brief description that summarizes what your expression does.

As the final topic in this overview, CXP 13 also supports Google Analytics for the web channel. Simply provide the web property ID, and data is automatically fed into Google Analytics – you can even add custom data if you want. Of course this is an additional option on top of Infostore, which also provides comprehensive data on user behavior and feeds CXP’s unique Hotspot Analytics that alerts you to application problems and provides you with actionable insight right within the CXP Developer IDE.

If you want to give some or all of the above a try yourself, you can download Voxeo CXP right now from http://developers.voiceobjects.com/downloads/deveditiondownload/

For a full list of our offerings, visit http://voxeo.com/products/

And as always, we’re interested in your comments – post here or reach me on Twitter Follow @voxeostefan

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Voice Biometrics Conference: What You Can Learn From a Phone Call

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:39:04 +0000

John Amein, the Senior VP of Product Managment, Voxeo, is attending the 2013 Voice Biometrics Conference in San Francisco today and tomorrow. The VBC SF theme: “Security in a Mobile, Multifactor World.”

If you’re attending the 2013 Voice Biometrics Conference, please join Voxeo’s John Amein, TRUSTID, Inc’s Patrick Cox and Pindrop Security’s Vijay Balasubramaniyan, on Thursday, May 9th from 11:15 am – 12:00 pm, for the break-out session: “What You Can Learn From a Phone Call.”

In this session, you’ll learn that there’s more to fraud detection than voiceprints and hear what other factors can come into play to support strong authentication.

With increased usage of social, mobile, the cloud and big data, there is also increased opportunity to leverage the capabilities of smart devices for a strong authentication factor that does not disrupt a streamlined authentication process.

If you want to know more about existing solutions and upcoming technologies for voice biometrics to support strong authentication and fraud prevention, then you don’t want to miss this Voxeo-sponsored event!

Announcing Voxeo CXP 13

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:43:43 +0000

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Voxeo CXP 13, the first and only product on the market today that provides a single platform to build, deploy, analyze and manage customer self-service applications across multiple channels, including voice, text, mobile web and social media. Voxeo CXP 13 was recently selected by a panel of prestigious industry judges as the winner of “Best of Enterprise Connect,” which recognizes products that have made significant technological advancements within the enterprise communications industry.

CXP 13 gives businesses the tools they need to meet and exceed ever-increasing customer expectations, with a “design once, deploy anywhere” architecture that enables application lifecycle management across multiple inbound self-service and outbound communications channels. Mobility is a core capability of Voxeo CXP, as is the ability to integrate with APIs such as location-based services to offer a richer and more personalized customer experience.

Voxeo CXP 13 enhancements include:

Dedicated channel views and channel-specific object browsing, enabling developers to focus on one communication channel at a time
An integrated HTML5 code editor
Embedded widget objects for building web forms
An embedded device simulator that renders the HTML code to show the look and feel of applications
Easy testing of mobile web apps via QR codes and flexible application preview in selected screen dimensions
Integration with Google Analytics, including reports on device and browser types, as well as customer behaviors and demographics

Voxeo CXP also offers:

Hotspot Analytics right inside the integrated development environment, making it easier than ever for developers to make application changes based on production data that was previously only available deep inside business user and administrator reports. By uniquely highlighting data and Key Performance Indicators within the application dialog flow, developers can quickly spot potential areas for improvement and take immediate action to optimize self-service.
An enhanced Business User Interface that provides non-technical business the ability to change and update components of live applications instantly, without involving an application developer or system administrator. Configurable parameters are determined by the developer and controlled by business rules. Common examples include managing hours of operation and call routes related to call transfers from your IVR, customizing messages, adding special announcements or marketing campaigns to your web apps, deactivating menu items in your IVR, two-way SMS, or web app, etc.

Voxeo CXP can be deployed on premise or in Voxeo’s global cloud. Anyone can try Voxeo CXP for free at www.voxeo.com/free with full access to Voxeo’s 24/7/365 technical support.

The “State of Voxeo” news release – announcing record growth and global expansion

Cool Vendors, Class of 2007: Where Are We Now?

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:59:25 +0000

Back in 2007, analyst firm Gartner named Voxeo to their “Cool Vendors in Enterprise Communications” list – recognizing five companies that would have an impact on the future of enterprise communications, using a three-pronged test of “Innovative, impactful and intriguing.” Voxeo was recognized for our commitment to standards, the ease of creating voice applications and availability of cloud hosting options.

In the last six years, we’ve built on that foundation: we’ve retained our commitment to building solutions on open standards and making application development and hosting easy, while our developer community has grown by a multiple of ten, our offerings have expanded from IVR to multi-channel customer experience offerings across voice, text, mobile and social channels.

Why are we bringing up 2007? In Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Unified Communications and Network Systems and Services, 2013″ report released last week, Gartner’s Bern Elliot revisited Voxeo in a “Where Are They Now?” segment. In addition to how our approach dramatically cuts voice application development costs while improving flexibility, they took a look at where we are today, recognizing our continuing success in the IVR market and our evolution into sophisticated offerings like IM, mobile web, SMS, social media, video and mobile apps, as well as our strong customer satisfaction ratings.

We took a look at the rest of our peer-set from that 2007 report, as well. Iotum has moved on from offering their Relevance Engine product to focus on the mobile conferencing market with Calliflower; Woven Systems’ assets were acquired by Fortinet; Lifesize was acquired by Logitech; and Litescape is continuing to provide UC solutions.

Being “innovative, impactful and engaging” is definitely in line with Voxeo’s culture, and we’re thrilled that it has consistently shown in our products, our solutions and the vitality of our developer community.

Random Hacks of Kindness San Francisco June 1st & 2nd 2013

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:45:18 +0000

In the three short years since its birth, Random Hacks of Kindness has held 177 hackathons in 37 countries and has grown to a community of thousands of hackers, experts and tech-savvy do-gooders around the world who have taken up the challenge of hacking for humanity in their own local communities and internationally.

Join Tropo June 1st & 2nd in San Francisco to help mobilize technology and create solutions to make our planet a better place. You don’t need to be a technologist to join in on the movement. Great minds in marketing, project management and subject matter experts are also very welcome to join forces with the global community of innovators and put their skills to great use.

Register today and collaborate with members of RHoK’s partners at Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and NASA just to name a few. If you’re looking for a Google maps expert, we’ve got your guy, straight from the source! Oh the beauty of being in the Bay Area.

For more information about RHoK and its many RHoKstars be sure to see the new report released in 2013 with all the details of how far the influential hackathon has come in such an amazingly short time!

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AngelHack and Tropo on Tour for Spring 2013

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:33:00 +0000

By Cristina Moe Salanova

Spring brings many things, warm weather, girls in sundresses and angels. That’s right, this May Tropo will join AngelHack on their 2013 world hackathon tour!

Not only is this the largest hackathon competition in the world with over 6,000 hackers in 30 cities but these angels also take the winners of each city and put them in a 12 week accelerator program then introduce them to Silicon Valley investors. Talk about a heavenly gig!

If you are in San Francisco, AngelHack will be here on Saturday and Sunday May 4th & 5th and you can register here. Not in the Bay Area, no problem. Check out the many other cities and Spring dates you can participate in. If you’re coming to the SF AngelHack, we’ll see you there with wings on.

Voxeo CXP and its APIs – Creating a true Ecosystem of Tools for your Self-Service Application Lifecycle

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:02:01 +0000

Voxeo CXP is a sophisticated product that has helped hundreds of customers and half of the Fortune 500 improve their phone-based customer self-service and call routing. It is known for covering the entire lifecycle of application management, with tools for application design, development, documentation, deployment, management, reporting, and analytics. What is less known is the APIs that sit at the core of its engine, CXP Server, which prompted our EMEA VP Engineering, Stefan Besling, to recently write a great blog post about this topic as well: It’s the API, stupid! I would like to elaborate on some of the examples he has given.

The SOAP-based Web Services API (documentation), a REST version for a subset of functions, and our XML-based SDK (the CXP XDK: documentation) are the foundation of the majority of tools that make CXP what it is, among them:

CXP Developer, the GUI and service creation & administration environment
Storyboard Manager, the prompt management tool based on MS Excel
CXP Commander, the graphical dashboard that sits in CXP Developer for service deployment, session partitioning, log/trace file management, etc.
CXP Analyzer, the reporting & analytics suite

The CXP XDK exposes the full power of multi-channel application lifecycle management via an open, well-documented XML-based development kit. The XDK enables developers to use a coding environment of their choice, from simple editors like Notepad or vi, to enterprise-grade authoring and deployment environments like Eclipse, SAP NetWeaver Studio, or IBM WebSphere Studio, while still retaining full access to the object-oriented design approach taken by Voxeo CXP.

At the heart of the XDK stands CXPML (CXP Markup Language: documentation), an XML-based application markup language. It sits on top of open standards such as VoiceXML for IVR or XHTML for Web apps, and provides a clear abstraction layer for truly unified multi-channel applications. Furthermore, it provides all the powerful capabilities built into the patented object technology of Voxeo CXP, such as a true object-oriented development approach and inheritance.

Oftentimes, our customers and partners mistake CXP Developer, the Eclipse-based IDE coming with the product, for what CXP is all about. The opposite is actually true: CXP Developer is NOT a representation of what Voxeo CXP is about, it is merely one (our) implementation of a GUI sitting on top of our APIs and exposing the power of CXP Server, the brain of the product. Using the Web Service API and XDK, you can in fact create your very own service creation and administration front-end. Several examples exist, such as SAP’s Netweaver Voice, that OEMs CXP Server but comes with its own GUI. Another one would be our very own Business User Interface, a Web-based front-end for non-technical staff to manage aspects of your IVR or multi-channel applications. (Read more in our BUI flyer.)

Voxeo CXP and its powerful CXP Server are truly more of a middleware that you can embed seamlessly in your enterprise service frameworks and processes. Furthermore, Service Providers use it to offer value-added services to enterprise clients. A lot of the applications built on top of the Voxeo CXP middleware are around what Gartner calls Communications-Enabled Business Processes, or CEBP – a prime example of an application type that benefits from APIs.

Let me give you some concrete examples of the APIs.

You would like to deploy CXP applications directly from XML files maintained in a version-control system used in your IT department? Go ahead, you can: deployXDKService (sessionID, serverRefID, serviceDef, isURI).
Or you prefer deploying your apps directly from a different system, in a “volatile” fashion based on a single XML parameter representing your application logic? The WS API allows that, too (same method, with isURI=false and serviceDef being the CXPML string representing your application logic).
You would like to embed a dashboard of CXP status information, such as a count of current callers into your system, directly into an existing Web-based front-end that you use for other applications? Easy: queryServer (sessionID, serverRefID, aggregateData).

As a matter of fact, one of our bigger customers, a large multi-national retailer, has done just that: They embed CXP-related data in a general dashboard of application (not just IVR) status and deployment features, that they had in place before they standardized on Voxeo for their IVR applications. A service provider customer of ours uses our APIs to streamline the deployment process across their multi-data-center setup of Voxeo CXP, now being able to deploy without touching any of our own tools – the process of bringing a new application version to production can be done completely from within their existing depoyment framework.

Developers often face tedious tasks such as batch creation of dialog objects, renaming operations, etc. CXP Developer does not have pre-built functions in the GUI for all of these tasks. However, using our APIs, a simple export of your application, coupled with an XML modification script in a scripting language of your choice, and a re-import, does the job:

exportProjectVersion (sessionID, projectName, versionName, format, zipped, exportLib)
…your XML string manipulation…
importObject (sessionID, projectName, versionName, generateNewGUIDs, overwriteByName, objectDef, isURI)

A lot of the API revolves around security: restricting access to who can see and do what (projects, deployed applications, sites in a multi-tenant environent, etc.), exploiting CXP’s built-in user management features, tracking user access, killing connections, locking down access to certain areas of an application etc.

I could go on and on, but I believe you get the message, and hopefully some ideas around how to use our product more efficiently for your own deployments: Voxeo CXP offers rich and powerful APIs to be truly embedded as middleware into your existing systems and processes to add feature-rich communications applications to your business, be it for self-service offerings to your customers or employees, or to enrich business processes with voice, SMS, or mobile applications to improve efficiency.

Follow me on Twitter:

Follow @tpgoebel

AngelHack and Tropo on Tour for Spring 2013

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:33:24 +0000

Spring brings many things, warm weather, girls in sundresses and angels. That’s right, this May Tropo will join AngelHack on their 2013 world hackathon tour!

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Visit Voxeo at Net.Finance 2013!

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:12:44 +0000

Are you attending Net.Finance – April 30th – May 2nd at The Wigwam hotel in Phoenix?

The three day show is packed with over fifty sessions and over sixty financial services speakers. The themes for the show include:

Mobile Channel Focus
Multi-Channel Strategy & Customer Engagement
Bank 3.0 & The Future Of Financial Services

As a proud sponsor of Net.Finance, Voxeo will be in attendance, along with our Master Reseller partner Waterfield Technologies, to discuss multi-modal customer service solutions for the financial industry. If you are attending the show, please visit our booth!

Reinventing Customer Service: Not Just a “Silicon Valley” Thing

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:49:38 +0000

The Washington Post asked last week, “Can Silicon Valley re-invent customer service?” The article accurately summarizes the massive shift in how companies offer customer service – with contact centers and live agents now being supplemented with a variety of different self service options between the customer and the live agent: crowd-sourced customer service forums, auto-responding “bots”, or “freemium” models where access to live agents becomes a premium offering – with some companies going so far as to even abolish 1-800 number for toll-free customer service.

But instead of railing against this model that moves away from live agents, they’re embracing the potential for technology to make self-service a viable option, not just when something goes wrong, but to improve the customer experience as a whole – particularly when utilizing the unique capabilities provided by now-ubiquitous mobile devices:

Most importantly, our mobile devices have become an extraordinarily powerful tool to bridge the customer service gap. And it goes beyond just using tablets to check in customers quickly for events. For example, new geofencing technology makes it possible to recognize when a user enters or leaves a specific geolocation and could be used to ensure that any customer entering a retail location is treated just like a long-time, valuable customer.

It may be true that customer expectations have changed so that any human interaction in the customer service process surprises us to the upside – but there’s an opportunity to improve upon that. The new layers of self-service technology should actually be increasing our expectations for the entire customer experience, not just in terms of problem-solving, but in the ability to provide a personalized, proactive customer experience that delights and retains customers.

The Washington Post article calls on Silicon Valley to help, but we think that customer service is already being reinvented here at Voxeo. Our platform enables companies to provide innovative self-service that utilizes inbound and outbound IVR, SMS, mobile applications and enhancements like location-based services:

The technology that supports a multi-modal experience that enhances the customer’s experience at every step of their journey already exists – and companies from Silicon Valley to Main Street USA are deploying it.

How is your company preparing for this shift in technology and the corresponding ability to reinvent the entire customer experience? Let us know in the comments!

Visit Voxeo at IBM Impact!

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:55:09 +0000

Are you attending IBM Impact – April 28-May 2 at the Venetian and Palazzo hotels in Las Vegas?

The theme for the show is an exploration of the many ways technology can drive innovation and growth:

From their website:

Impact 2013 is designed for IT and business leaders who understand that to lead in today’s economy, outperforming organizations are especially focused on combining technology with the business to drive innovation and growth. They understand that to succeed – they have to leverage Mobile, Social, Cloud and Big Data and re-imagine their operations, their processes, and their technology.

As an IBM Alliance Partner, Voxeo will be in attendance at IBM Impact. Voxeo’s Tobias Goebel will also be speaking about automated communications technology in the cloud. If you are attending the show, please visit us at our booth in the Solution Center and check out Tobias’ presentation!

Join the Globe Labs Voice API 2013 Challenge!

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:31:00 +0000

By Diggz

Last week we had great fun visiting Manila with the Globe Labs team for Globe Labs Developer Day, where they previewed their new Voice API powered by Tropo. Globe is the latest of the world’s leading telecom operators to open up the Tropo API to their developers. As you may recall, Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden launched the Telekom Tropo API last summer, followed by the launch of AT&T’s Call Management API (powered by Tropo) in January of this year.

Following the success of last weekend’s Developer Day, Globe Labs has now announced the Globe Labs Voice API Challenge 2013. The Globe Labs Voice API Challenge 2013 is a call-for-apps program which aims to provide incentives for developers to build new and innovative apps that leverage voice capabilities using the Globe Labs Voice APIs.

Developers will have the chance to receive P50,000.

Globe Labs Voice API Challenge is open to all individuals and companies registered with the Globe Labs Developer Community. Registration can be done on-line via the Globe Labs Developer Portal (https://www.globelabs.com.ph). Participants can be individuals or teams.

Developers can join the program by submitting your app idea / proposal via this Voice API Challenge proposal form , and submitting it along with the other requirements via email apichallenge@globelabsbeta.com or via snail mail on or before April 29, 2013.

For more information, visit the the Globe Labs website:

Globe Labs – Voice API Challenge 2013

Join the Globe Labs Voice API 2013 Challenge!

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:31:35 +0000

Developers will have the chance to receive P50,000.

For more information, visit the the Globe Labs website:

Globe Labs – Voice API Challenge 2013

Voxeo Office Tour – EMEA!

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:52:48 +0000

Last year, we produced a tour of our US headquarters in Orlando – check it out here if you haven’t! We couldn’t let our US team have all the fun, though. In this video, Voxeo’s Sabine Winterkamp leads a tour of our new office space in Cologne, Germany, and you’ll see and hear from our European team:

International Space Apps Challenge April 20th and 21st

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:30:00 +0000

By Cristina Moe Salanova

Ever day dream about working at NASA?

Well if you didn’t actually become an astronaut now is your chance to live out your fantasy at the International Space Apps Challenge this weekend on April 20th and 21st.

This international collaboration is held in 83 cities all over the world and you can find Troponauts, Cristina and Johnny Diggz, participating in San Francisco and all the way over in Krakow!

This exploration of space uses problem solving with open-source solutions to both life on Earth and life in space. Join a team and provide solutions for challenges including developing a greenhouse for missions on the moon and underwater robots that explore where no human can go, there is something spectacular for everyone.

You may not have gone to space camp but now you can join thousands of others to help provide a collaborative solution to advance space exploration and improve the quality of life on Earth.

International Space Apps Challenge April 20th and 21st

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:30:24 +0000

Ever day dream about working at NASA?

Well if you didn’t actually become an astronaut now is your chance to live out your fantasy at the International Space Apps Challenge this weekend on April 20th and 21st.

This international collaboration is held in 83 cities all over the world and you can find Troponauts, Cristina and Johnny Diggz, participating in San Francisco and all the way over in Krakow!

You may not have gone to space camp but now you can join thousands of others to help provide a collaborative solution to advance space exploration and improve the quality of life on Earth.

Holy Cow, Krakow! Railsberry and Mobile Mobile Conf

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:09:00 +0000

By Cristina Moe Salanova

Looks like there is a lot more going on in Poland’s capitol than amazing vodka and Kielbasa (Polish sausages)!

Besides Krakow’s famous Gothic and Renaissance architecture it is now becoming famous for its killer tech conferences and communities.

This April, the cool kids at Applicake are putting on two conferences, Railsberry, The European Rails Conference on April 23rd-24th. And with a different twist than last year. They will be challenging Rails developers to focus on everything BUT Rails. A conference for the curious. If you have yet to see the legendary Railsberry Grand Finale performed by our own Johnny Diggz last year, you must watch and see just why he had a standing ovation!

And just days before on April 18th-19th they will host Mobile Mobile Conf , a conference for developers, designers, creatives and creators out there who LOVE mobile.

Learn everything from Appanomics to Why Marketing Ain’t Bullshit with a big balloon party at the end. You don’t want to miss this!

If Diggz did a finale last year that even made it onto Github, who knows what he will do this year and with TWO conferences!

If there’s anyone up for the challenge, he is.

Holy Cow, Krakow! Railsberry and Mobile Mobile Conf

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:09:58 +0000

Looks like there is a lot more going on in Poland’s capitol than amazing vodka and Kielbasa (Polish sausages)!

Besides Krakow’s famous Gothic and Renaissance architecture it is now becoming famous for its killer tech conferences and communities.

And just days before on April 18th-19th they will host Mobile Mobile Conf , a conference for developers, designers, creatives and creators out there who LOVE mobile.

Learn everything from Appanomics to Why Marketing Ain’t Bullshit with a big balloon party at the end. You don’t want to miss this!

If Diggz did a finale last year that even made it onto Github, who knows what he will do this year and with TWO conferences!

If there’s anyone up for the challenge, he is.

Tropo’s Secret Sauce

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 07:49:00 +0000

By May Yip

Alan Quayle is well known in the communications API space, and he’s been chatting with our customers about their experiences with Tropo and Phono. We’ve reprinted his recent weblog entitled Tropo’s Secret Sauce about his interview with Frank Geck, Director of Tropo Sales.”
Enjoy!
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Tropo’s Secret Sauce by Alan Quayle

Voxeo Labs continues to give me free reign across their customers to chat about their experiences in running their businesses on Telecom APIs; such as myaNUMBER, Crunched, TeleSmart and there are many more weblogs to come. It’s a wonderful experience to see real businesses built on telecoms APIs and those businesses loving it. Love is a common theme, from the interviews with Voxeo Labs’ customers, I’d go as far as to say they have a fair bit of love for what Voxeo Labs is doing for them, it’s beyond happy. So I took the opportunity to chat with Frank Geck, Director of Tropo Sales at Voxeo Labs who’s been letting me at their customer, to better understand how they’ve made it happen.

AQ: “What does Tropo do to makes its customers so enthusiastic about Telecom APIs?”
Frank: That’s easy, Tropo is carrier grade. Now, it’s easy to make the claim, so let me point to the direct objective evidence to back up that claim. Carriers worldwide have selected the Tropo platform for their developer community, such as AT&T and Deutsche Telekom. Their requirements are exacting to say the least, and we exceed them. Another fact, the software that manages our audio/voice/messaging processes over 80,000 concurrent conversations on a daily basis. It’s a scale unmatched in the industry for communication APIs. A reason you’re talking to such happy customers is many of our customer wins came to us when prompted by problems on other platforms. We came to the rescue just as their business was ramping up and problems started to seriously impact their business’s growth. And finally Tropo is design for best performance, it’s built by a team that brings decades of experience in cloud communications, none of our competitors can match our depth of experience.

AQ: “Support is a significant source of satisfaction with your customers, TeleSmart being a good example, how are you doing it?”
Frank: Our customers are running their business on Tropo, we have to be there 24*7. Technical support is free to all customers because of the confidence we have in our platform, while its paid on competitors because they are not as confident. And support is not just about problems, it’s about innovation, we have a technical account management team that helps customers do more with Tropo, Phono, Ameche and all the capabilities we’re constantly adding. When our customers are successful so are we, as TeleSmart and Crunched clearly demonstrate.

AQ: “In some of the interviews your customers mentioned Tropo has the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO), can you explain what they mean?”
Frank: Evaluating the cost of a service isn’t as simple as looking at pricing terms on a web page. And, for many customers they are new to telecommunications applications, so it’s a challenge to evaluate their choices. When I talk to a customer I show them what all the considerations are in their business decision. When you consider technical support, application functionality, value of a high quality network – we typically see savings of 20-40% over anyone else in the market. We’re not trying to be the lowest cost vendor in the market – we’re trying to be the best overall value. For start ups, it’s even more critical. The rule of thumb is that it takes seven times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an old one. Start ups invest heavily in customer acquisition. We also know that a poor experience results in losing potential customers. So you’re a start up – you’ve had a great launch at a trade show and now a percentage of your callers don’t have a good experience. Would you rather have selected a carrier grade platform or saved fifty dollars a monthly in fees?

If a customer has 100,000 voice minutes or more a month, we’ll put together a package that provides significant savings compared to the others in the market. We don’t hide fees, everything is upfront. And critically costs associated with poor quality are massive, as it impacts your brand, revenues, and distracts the organization from the prime objective of excellent customer service. If you care about your customers’ experience, then you have to consider if saving a few hundred dollars a month is worth it. All this comes together to deliver the lowest TCO in the industry.

AQ: “Another common theme was the confidence customer have in Tropo as a partner into the future, where is that coming from?”
Frank: Voxeo Labs continues to be a technology leader, and that leadership gives our customers an edge. We were first to market in web-based communications with Phono launched back in 2010, and we are an editor of the WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) specification, that’s enabled customers like Crunched to easily add wide-band voice to their service. We’re the only vendor who’s invested in multiple API’s for implementing applications. We have a Web Services API just like everyone else but we also have native API’s in Ruby, PHP, Javascript, Python, and Groovy. We’re leading the market with our innovative Ameche platform that opens up new application concepts and distribution of those applications across Telcos. Then, combine Tropo, Phono and Ameche and you have even more solution packages that you can create. If all you care about is long code SMS messaging, then we’re not the best vendor for you.

AQ: “Are there any other secret sauce recipes you think are important?”
Frank: We’re truly international. We have local telephone numbers in more than forty countries which gives us the best global coverage. We support twenty-four speech recognition languages. We have speech to text voices in twenty-four languages twenty-four speech recognition languages- and more options in US English than anyone else giving developers and user interface designers the most choices. We’ve been SIP from day one – just just adding it later. We’re free for development to make it as easy as possible for anyone to get started. All these features and options are important when evaluating a SaaS platform because you may not know today what you need in the future but you can rest assured that Voxeo Labs will have it for you when you need it.

Tropo’s Secret Sauce

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:49:43 +0000

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Tropo’s Secret Sauce by Alan Quayle

Two Ruby on Rails courses @ Tropo’s secret lair, be there or be square!

Globe Labs Developer Day-Makati City, Philippines

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:28:00 +0000

By cmoe

Power up with voice!

On April 13, 2013 key members of the Voxeo Labs team, our CTO Jose de Castro and Chief Developer Evangelist Johnny ‘Diggz’ Higgins will be sharing how to power up your application with Voice API.

The event will be held from 9am-5pm at the Globe Corporate Showroom, Ground Floor, Valero Telepark, # 111, Valero Street, Makati City (venue Map). Tickets are available now and you must reserve a seat for Globe Labs Developer Day.

Bring your laptop and join in for the hands on session and mini hackathon and you might just get Globe premium items!