For many reasons, last but not least the volcano’s ash cloud that is blocking Europe these days, I couldn’t attend eComm America, taking place these days near San Francisco.
However, I’ve been following the Twitter stream coming from eComm‘s attendees and speakers and took a look at some new services launched during the show. Ringio is definitely one that caught my attention.
Ringio aims to offer advanced rich calling and collaboration features, tipically designed for enterprises, to the SMB market. A tour of the service immediately gives you an idea on how powerful their platform is and the set of features is impressive. Moreover, I really like how the UI is designed, something critical to make the learning time for users as short as possible.
I signed up for a free trial and the configuration was very easy. I inserted the phone number I wanted to be called to and selected a local US number. Everything is offered as SaaS, nothing has to be installed in the company’s premises (definitely a plus!). By default, two departments are assigned to my company (and to each user), Sales and Client Service. When someone dials that number, an IVR offers the ability to select the department to contact. I initially inserted an italian number as the main number to receive calls but, being italian, it doesn’t work, so I changed it and put in my Google Voice number, configured on my desktop VoIP phone.
After having installed theit AIR desktop app on my Mac, I then tried to call the number assigned by Ringio to my company. I immediately got a popup informing that I was receiving a call where I could press “answer”. Then, Ringio redirected the call to the phone number provided during the signup process. If the caller’s CLI was on my address book (that could be Google Contacts), all the information of the caller would have been shown on my desktop app.
The cool thing is that the second time I tried to call, the welcome voice message, through text to speech, spelled the name of my company and asked me to press 1 if I wanted to talk to Luca again! Wonderful user experience…
One aspect that led me to try this service out is the fact that they focused on offering a service “in the cloud” with no impact for the IT/Telephony infrastructure of the company and, at the same time, providing value that the final customer can immediately perceive. In my opinion, this is crucial and it is the same philosophy I try to follow in my company when we design new services/products. Hearing your customer saying “so, you are saying I don’t have to change ANYTHING in my company’s PBX? no need to bother the IT department???” is PRICELESS.
I haven’t had enough time to try the service more, but it’s definitely powerful and very promising (plus, an Android app is available to take calls from a mobile phone). In particular, I appreciated the ease to use and nice user interface. I’m pretty sure we’ll heard about Ringio again very soon… Mmm, Google, Google Contacts, Android… isn’t it a wonderful companion of Google Voice for SMBs? (hint…).
NOTE: This post was originally published on my personal blog, but I thought it was something very interesting to be shared with Voyces’ readers.
DISCLOSURE: Ringio is represented by my Voyces colleague, Andy Abramson’s agency.
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Luca:
The concept and web design are really nice. However, in my own testing, the Adobe Air application behaves erratically and it’s not at all Mac-like (or probably Windows or Linux-like). The IDEA of using Air is good but the current implementation leave a lot to be desired.
I like the quick start and setup of the company and users, but the feature set is a little light compared to most hosted services like OnSip or Packet8. This issue can be overcome in successive versions.
I have tested both cell phones and deskphones (SIP, of course) and I find the voice quality to be a little wanting. While there are advantages to the dialback model, even Google Voice recognizes the limitations and use their API on the iPhone and Android web apps to dial directly instead of dialing back from their service.
The most important objection I think is the fact that it’s not really integrated into a supported set of IP phones. Most businesses in the target demographic (e.g., Micro-businesses) would be much more comfortable buying standard SIP phones so all the employees sound alike and can be more easily supported.
There’s more I have to say, but RingIO is a great start, it’s not fully implemented and is misses some key requirements in terms of hardware and feature support for the Micro-business. It’s a little expensive for the feature set, which can be remedied pretty quickly.
marc.
Luca –
Great summary. The only challenge I’ve had so far is getting my iPhone contacts sync’d into Google contacts so I can use them easily from Ringio. This isn’t a problem in Ringio, its something about Google contacts I can’t make work yet.
Marc -
I’m the CEO of Voxeo. Ringio is built on the Voxeo cloud telephony platform, and we use only uncompressed audio (g.711) with no voice activity detection (vad), and have automated closed-loop tests (SIP-> PSTN -> PSTN -> SIP) that monitor voice quality.
I’d love to know what you didn’t like about the voice quality – what can we improve? I’m somewhat obsessed with having the best voice quality in the industry, so I’d appreciate any input you have.
Also, because Ringio runs on Voxeo, they have ready access to support for SIP, Skype, Jingle, etc… I’m sure they’ll release such features in their UI – I’m sure they needed to focus on the most commonly used features for the 1.0. I also think the 1.0 is an amazingly great start!
-J
Ringio is the second such company to come from their founders brain trust. Their previous SaaS communications company has now grow into Enterprise contact centers, while the founders have gone back to their roots. A great SME play for companies, to sound like larger firms and maintain costs. I am so pleased they have gone to a single subscriber based service, rather than their previous companies pay per minute (metered) service. With the additional Wireless control interfaces, I am sure are coming, we have a CaaS service for the masses.