"Mashups," which are defined as a web application hybrid, have become popular for their ability to bring together applications into one easy integrated tool.
In the telephony space, a 'phone mashup' is a hybrid of a web site and a telephone that brings together information from a company's website to their customer's telephone.
With phone mashups, Ifbyphone (News - Alert) notes it is possible for businesses to have truly effective communications.
Adding a click-to-call to a webpage for example, makes it possible to bring the telephone and web together and provide customers with a way to always been in communication with the company.
Along with click-to-call, businesses can also include an automated voice broadcast or an Interactive Voice Response
system to communicate effectively with their customers.
Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro (News - Alert) notes that while phone mashups provide the best solution for improving customer service and reducing costs, complexity and expenses behind utilizing CCXML and VoiceXML (News - Alert) standards can make it difficult for any business, and particularly smaller businesses and independent developers, to create them.
"Many Click-to-Call solutions now available in the marketplace tend to be limited in flexibility. Phone mashups require flexibility. Phone mashup APIs need to be usable by any web developer with basic web form coding skills. In essence, the phone mashup API
should replace web forms with voice forms," notes Shapiro.
In support of this need, Ifbyphone offers a flexible family of APIs called Ifbyphone Glue that bring together web information and voice on any telephone and make it possible to initiate a number of different click-to-call scenarios, as well as schedule voice broadcast messages and reminder calls, among other options.
Also, Ifbyphone makes it possible for calls made to an Ifbyphone provisioned telephone number to be routed to different destinations based on various factors--- all of which are key to building a successful phone mashup.
To see more of what Shapiro has to say about Phone Mashups, check out the Ifbyphone Blog.
Stefania Viscusi is an established writer and avid reader. To see more of her articles, please visit Stefania Viscusi’s columnist page.
Application Programming Interface (API) | X |
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Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |