Web Applications

Network World's Web Applications Newsletter, 09/10/07

Ifbyphone – all singing, all dancing telephony

By Mark Gibbs

It is amazing that despite the explosion of Internet communications the good, old-fashioned telephone and its upstart offspring, the cell phone, are still the primary communications tools for business. Forget Skype, videoconferencing, instant messaging, micro-blogging and softphones, for many businesses the telephone and the cell phone still rule.

So, if you are looking to make your retro telephone services work better with the online world you might want to check out Ifbyphone.com, a Web application that extends Web sites back to into the world of telephony.

At the heart of Ifbyphone is the Click-to-XyZ service, a Web link that routes the client to Ifbyphone’s various applications. (The Web site is really, really badly written making the relationship of Click-to-XyZ to the other features as obscure as possible – I had to read the support documentation to figure it out!)

The applications that Click-to-XyZ routes to are Click-to-Call (also referred to as Call-Me-Now), Click-to-Survo, Click-to-Find, Click-to-Virtual Receptionist, and Click-to-Voicemail. All work by a pop-up Web form asking for your number and then when you submit you are connected to the target application.

Click-to-Call connects you to a designated client number with scheduling support (i.e. who you are connected to is dependent on the day and time). Click-to-Survo is much more complex; it is an interactive voice response system that is designed for surveys but looks like you could do a lot more with it. The output can be to e-mail, a database, or integrated with other applications.

Click-to-Find is a routing system that polls a sequence of numbers to connect a call depending on time of day and week while Click-to-Virtual Receptionist is just that, a connection to a virtual switchboard. Finally, Click-to-Voicemail connects you, as you might imagine, directly to a voicemail service.

Ifbyphone can provision toll-free numbers and provides a telephone broadcast service that can deliver a static or interactive message.

Add to this an API and, more usefully, and you have a very interesting proposition for streamlining your telephone-based communications and integrating them with the online world.

There are three levels of service starting with Bronze at $14.95 a month, which only supports Click-to-Call, through Silver at $24.95 a month with 5 Smart Click-to-Calls, Call Tracking, a toll-free number, 5 Voice Mail Boxes, Virtual Receptionist, Find Me, Wake Up Calls and Reminders, to Gold at $39.95 a month, which includes all Ifbyphone services and tools, unlimited Smart Click-to-Calls, three toll-free numbers, 10 voicemail boxes, Virtual Receptionist Voice Dialogs, Voice Broadcasting and access to the API.

On top of those fees are usage charges that cover actual telephony minutes used. Charges start at no monthly minimum for 100 free minutes and 13 cents per additional minute to $400 for 5,100 included minutes and 8 cents per additional minute. There are also high volume plans.

As a one-stop, all singing, all dancing, online/offline telephone service Ifbyphone is very impressive and perhaps the most sophisticated offering of its type I’ve seen so far.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist and now blogger: Check out Gibbsblog.

Gibbs not only pens (well, keyboards) this newsletter he also writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. We’ll spare you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go here

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