What do Ringio, SATMAP and RingRevenue all have in common? Yes, each is innovating in telecom. All are focused on applications and services designed to help customers market better and sell more.Those are the easy answers. The one least obvious: each owe at least some of their success to an earlier set of innovators who brought us Caller ID, back when.
Caller ID, now considered the simplest of telephony features, has changed our lives. What was once a breakthrough--one that generated sweet margins for telcos--is now standard. Answering the phone, or not answering that is, has become a function of who's calling. But like other quickly commoditized telephony features, Caller ID no longer fetches the same line item fees it once did.
Yet it's interesting to see the number of emerging communications companies--including the ones I listed above--leveraging this ever-present information in creative ways, to monetize their offerings.
Caller ID has become, in effect, our ID: The mobile is ubiquitous. It is far less common to mark one's number "private". Linking telephony to a computer application has become child's play. And lastly, thanks to number portability, we really can be tied to one number for life.
Put it all together, and caller ID offers the ideal layer on top of which to build applications that create real business value. Take a look at how these three companies are doing it:
Ringio: A DC-based company that only recently launched, Ringio is a cloud-based phone system that does many of things we have become accustomed to from small business Virtual PBXs. But it takes the offering several big steps forward by adding live context to every call, using the desktop or smart phone screen as its vehicle. Using Caller ID as one of its unique identifiers, the vision of Ringio is to do a real-time dip into cloud to access a variety of data points and social information about the caller. Think Linkedin, Twitter, Salesforce or even your inbox. How much faster could you engage a caller if contextual information appeared on your screen automatically, as you spoke? The ultimate mashup, you could say.
SATMAP: In the call center, the screen pop is not new. For years, we've integrated CRM with inbound telephony to "pop" information for the agent about the caller. And we've used IVRs to route calls based on how callers answer questions. But SATMAP pushes this envelope, by using the caller ID information--and the database information it can dynamically invoke--to decide which agent is best suited for the call. Before it's distributed. Think elderly first time caller, or a twenty-something who calls all the time. Surely mapping them to the right personality could positively impact the outcome of the call.
RingRevenue: This is an offering best described by its tag line: "Track calls, like clicks". RingRevenue's pay-per-call platform, conceived specifically for the performance (aka: Affiliate) marketing industry, uses caller ID as an identifier of inbound phone leads originating from a given website. The caller ID is used in much the same way online lead tracking uses an IP address. And just as a company like Google gets to know you online through your IP address, RingRevenue can leverage caller ID information to help its client optimize inbound leads--particularly over time.
These companies have each developed unique services that that require far more than old-fashioned caller ID. But with all the complex development going on in communications these days, we tend to overlook that much of it is built on top of what once was considered disruptive. Caller ID, for one, is among those that deserve more credit.
