Provider of on-demand call center and IVR technology, Angel.com debuted Outbound IVR, the latest installment to its line of call center solutions that allows organizations to instantly deliver thousands of interactive phone calls using a Web-based toolkit. Angel.com’s Outbound IVR provides businesses and organizations with a new tool to provide or collect important and often time-sensitive information, allowing businesses to survey customers, notify customers of package deliveries and help school districts alert parents and students of delays and closings due to inclement weather.

 

Mike Zirngible, CEO of Angel.com was available for a Q&A session with TMCnet on Outbound IVR and offered his executive insight on the latest solution from Angel.com.

 

 

I guess the short answers would be: ‘Not Very’ and ‘Very.’ For example, if you’d like to run an outbound campaign, we’ll give you an easy-to-use interface to upload your lists and execute them. If you’d like to add “Click to Call” outbound functionality to your website, we’ll give you a button that you can place wherever you see most appropriate for our system to call your customers. And, if you have web developers, they can make your CRM and customer care systems automatically place calls for alerts, notifications and reminders using simple web techniques.

 

Well, certainly retailers and e-tailers that are looking to deploy surveys to measure customer satisfaction (and receive real-time results, I might add). Also, political groups that are looking to get out the vote or facilitate calls to Congress would certainly benefit from using Angel.com Outbound IVR, especially since there is an election coming up in a few weeks.

 

Angel.com charges you on a per-minute basis, with any discounts from our standard per minute price determined by volume, length of plan period, length of commitment and the type of application. Our standard pricing starts at $.17 per minute for toll-free minutes, and $.12 per minute for local (703) minutes.

 

Most on-premise vendors sell bloat-ware, overly complicated solutions that users hate and IT managers despise. Many of our customers have come to us as a replacement for these traditional CPE vendors such as Aspect and Nortel (News - Alert). Given the economics of Software as a Service, within an internal IT organization it’s hard to replicate the operational expertise in running telephony infrastructure that a hosted provider accumulates.

 

I think that one of the best things about Angel.com is that it is highly scaleable. I know that’s a buzzword that is thrown around a lot, but for us, the term is definitely accurate. For instance, we offer a Virtual Receptionist product that handles the basic office routing and messaging needs of small-to-mid size businesses, while our Virtual Call Center can meet the needs of companies that need hundreds of thousands or even millions of minutes of call time per month.

 

For customers with HIPAA requirements, there is no choice other than vendor certification. For companies subject to fewer regulations, it’s important to ensure the following: Security is built into the hosted design (e.g. Data is transient unless persistence is absolutely necessary), there are audit mechanisms, there are ways to share information on an as-needed basis, and the hosted provider has more to lose from an incident than the customer. As long as these safeguards are in place, the other benefits of the hosted model will dramatically tip the balance in the favor of on-demand.

 

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For more information, visit www.angel.com