Guest Poster Khyle Keys Says ‘Sit down, have a drink from the TAP’

With the rapid acceptance of VoIP in the marketplace and the inroads VoIP providers are making into businesses and residential markets, VoIP is certainly going mainstream. But it’s not enough.

One of the great benefits of VoIP is that it is feature-rich. With programmable phones and soft phones, new functionality can be added quickly. You simply can’t do that with a standard PBX. All VoIP providers can, to the extent that their resources allow, present those features as value-adds to retain their customers and get more revenue by providing solid value.

However, there’s a new market that is developing that will affect not only VoIP providers, but a huge portion of businesses – small and large. Allow me to introduce you to a relatively new term – Telephony Application Provider (TAP). There are a plethora of companies that allow telephony interaction via API (Application Programming Interface). For all sorts of businesses, they can now voice-enable their existing applications to reach out to their customers in ways that were previously impossible or cost prohibitive. VoIP providers have the ability to form partnerships to use these TAPs to extend their feature set in a very fast, efficient and cost- effective way.

Then there is the company I work for, http://www.dialogtech.com/. I like to think we (and the companies above) are bridging gaps. Our Survos (IfByPhone’s name for our Interactive Voice Response implementation) allow companies to offload calls from their call centers, qualify leads, and much more. Click-to-call technology helps Search Engine Marketer’s bridge the gap by tracking phone calls that are generated from internet ad campaigns (in addition to existing web analytics). Call tracking allows companies to measure online and off-line metrics as part of a single campaign.

The great thing is that all of these companies present a huge opportunity. Implementations can be as easy or as complex as you want them to be. You can create a fully-fledged application that uses your business rules, and runs against your data, dynamically changing the path of the call while the user is on the phone. Or, you can send a simple message. It’s your choice. VoIP providers that capitalize on the opportunity will ultimately be the most successful in differentiating themselves in the marketplace.

The technology behind all these companies is not new. But the market we’re creating is. And the smart people are going to be the ones who can take full advantage of the emerging marketplace.

If you’d like to talk to me, just click here, and I’ll call you back.

Khyle Keys
Channel Manager,
IfByPhone