Voxeo Labs

Tropo powers Speak2Leads

May Yip — 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

May Yip — 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.”

AngelHack and Tropo on Tour for Spring 2013

admin — 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.

Join the Globe Labs Voice API 2013 Challenge!

admin — 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

International Space Apps Challenge April 20th and 21st

admin — 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.

Holy Cow, Krakow! Railsberry and Mobile Mobile Conf

admin — 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.

Tropo’s Secret Sauce

admin — 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.

Globe Labs Developer Day-Makati City, Philippines

admin — 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!

TeleSmart: Using Tropo to Create An Uncommonly Seductive Offer

Diggz — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:54:00 +0000

By Diggz

TeleSmart was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. TeleSmart offers custom-tailored call routing and IVR solutions. They’ve processed over 78 million customer calls serving thousands of clients. They are the largest independent provider of vanity numbers in North America, with over 25k such numbers under management. In today’s web-centric world we may think such services are declining in usage, they are not, with the rise in ecommerce, traffic on vanity numbers continues to grow.

TeleSmart’s services cover IVR, toll-free, call routing, tracking, and reporting services to businesses, all these services run on Tropo. It’s an archetype for why running your business on Tropo makes business sense. TeleSmart focuses on keeping its customers happy with great service, while Tropo focuses on running TeleSmart’s network, the most reliable and best supported Telecom API available.

Brian Lynott, CEO and Owner of TeleSmart, has this advice for other businesses looking at Telecom APIs:

“You don’t have to own everything. Running a network distracts you from customer service. Tropo focuses on providing the most reliable network and the best support. Seriously they respond to my questions in minutes, it’s wonderful, they share ideas that improve my business. And we can focus on delivering the best service and best support to our customers.”

TeleSmart’s speech recognition IVR provides 24 x 7 access for field staff reporting. Using their survey builder tools, customers can create project-specific questions including audio comment attachments. They can even assign new phone numbers in minutes or password-protect access to their service. Simply call the toll free number and use simple voice commands to interact with advanced project reporting. The questionnaire can be as detailed as required, with the callers simply voicing their responses to queues.

“All levels of our organization have access to configure the service, and we encourage and help our customers get in and configure their service for themselves. Everyone’s empowered to deliver what the customer wants, and Tropo makes this possible. Compare this to the large Telcos, if you call them most will not know they offer such IVR services, and forget about on a call to set up the service making any type of customization then and there. With TeleSmart it’s how we do business every day.”

TeleSmart’s SmartECR™ (Smart Enhanced Call Routing) is a sophisticated, network-based call router supporting applications ranging from simple informational messages played to the caller, to sophisticated caller interaction applications based on menus and databases. Their SmartECR™ telephone network routes calls to customer locations based on data such as: Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS); Automatic Number Identification (ANI); or caller-input Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) telephone keypad entries. Their services are delivered from our proprietary IVR (Interactive Voice Response) platform, running on Tropo.

“Back in 2008 we started the migration to the cloud. We needed a partner that would work with us in delivering the best possible customer service. Voxeo Labs has proved to a wise choice, we’ve worked together over the years creating new and innovative applications using Tropo that keep our customers’ delighted. And critically it’s a platform that has unmatched reliability, while those running on Amazon were down for a day, our service kept on running. When a computer network goes down people accept it, it’s been that way for decades. But when a phone call cannot be made, people do not accept that and get angry. Voxeo Labs brings the best of Data and Telecoms together.”

On Brian’s future plans, “We have only a few percent of the Vanity Numbers here in North America, there are millions of them. We can grow our North American market significantly over the coming years. With Voxeo Labs, we are looking into international markets, where we can bring our rich portfolio of applications built on the Tropo API and our intense customer focus to disrupt less competitive markets.” Tropo has helped accelerate TeleSmart’s business.

“In running your business on Telecom APIs, your choice of partner is critical. Spend the time to talk with other customers of the potential partner, as well as talk to the support people and CEO about your business and its needs, we did and we’re so pleased we took that time. It will give you the confidence to let Voxeo Labs focus on what they do best, so you can be best at what you do. For us its delivering an uncommonly seductive offer in custom-tailored call routing and IVR solutions.”

Keeping up with the SXSW action in Austin

Diggz — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:48:00 +0000

By Diggz

It’s difficult to keep up with all the chaos surrounding SXSW in Austin, but the Tropo team has a few ways that you can keep up with the action.

Live with @Photo

Our favorite intrepid photographer, Michael O’Donnell, is racing around to all the best events and parties with his trusty Cannon 5D, capturing the best moments of SXSW, which immediate get uploaded to his SmugMug account (using an Eyefi Wifi SD card and a 4g AT&T data stream). Follow the photo stream here: Live with @Photo sponsored by Tropo

The Villa Austin Live Broadcast

Catch Bravo celebrity, Hermione Way as she broadcasts live daily from the Villa Austin. The Villa Austin live stream will be hosting panels, discussions, gossip, and insider info to where all the best parties are. Monday afternoon we’ll be spotlighting Tropo startups, or check out the whole schedule here. You can tune in via Ustream, or just go to http://villa.io.

The Villa Austin Livestream

Streaming by Ustream;