So, let’s say you’ve built a Web application that streamlines your business processes and you’d really like people to use it rather than go through your customer service reps. The problem is that if your customers are used to calling your company and your telephony front end offers something like “”please go to www.mysite.com or press 3 to speak to a representative” you know they’ll just press “3” and carry on as usual.
What you’d really like to do is front-end your Web application and make speaking to customer service not, well, difficult, but also not a first or even early choice.
3 interesting Twitter tools
Now, many organizations already do this kind thing but if you want to build your own telephony service that will do whatever handstands you want such as provide an excellent customer service interface, where do you start?
Sure, there are all sorts of telephony application development and support systems you can bolt on to the likes of Asterisk or whatever your PBX platform may be but for many organizations this kind of application rarely warrants the expense of undertaking a serious development project because of the cost and time involved.
So why not bolt an online telephony service onto your Web application? The service I’m thinking of here is Twilio, which describes itself as a “cloud communications service.”
When one of your customers calls your Twilio number you can have them interact with a script you define with simple XML content to trap metadata about the call (caller ID, geolocation, etc.) and send that to your own applications running wherever you please (on your in-house servers in a DMZ, on a hosting service, or in a third party cloud) via an HTTP POST request.
Once received, your applications can, in turn, request Twilio to do a number of things including play a sound file, render speech from text, get keyboard input, or record the call.
You can also create conference calls and program the service to behave exactly as you want it to as well as send requests to Twilio to initiate telephony services such as make outbound calls, send and receive SMS messages, and even create and manage a virtual PBX that also behaves exactly as you require.
Twilio provides excellent and extensive documentation with plenty of examples in multiple languages.
Pricing is very simple and, for that matter, very reasonable: $0.01 per minute for inbound calls, $0.02 per minute for outbound calls, and $0.02 per message for SMS use while phone numbers are $1 each per month for the U.S. and Canada and $2 for toll-free numbers. Volume pricing is also available.
Twilio will even give you a $30 credit to get started!
Interestingly, while many Web services now proclaim themselves to be “cloud services”, Twilio actually passes the test by making scalability simple and transparent … need more numbers? There’s an API call for that. Need more concurrent inbound lines? There’s another call for that.
So my conclusion: Twilio is a really cool idea. Well-designed, well-documented, and well-priced … what more could you ask for?
