Warheads Stacked in the Kitchen

Jason Goecke
Jason Goecke

Jason Goecke has a long history in telephony. His unique perspective is built on extensive business experience around the world as well as technical depth. His passion for disruption manifests itself in his on-going support of open source telephony, with the latest phase being his commitment to the Adhearsion project.

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2010 (1)
2009 (43)
 

Fonolo and Deep Dialing Ripe for Crowdsourcing

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While many times having an IVR interface to the company you are calling is useful. There are those times that from the start, we know we need to speak to a live person. This is when these same systems become a source of frustration. Too often companies make it nearly impossible to get to a real person quickly. In steps 'Deep Dialing' (a similar concept to 'Deep Linking' on the web), which allows you to use an alternative voice system to bypass the IVR menus of a company and get directly to a live person. Fonolo is currently in public beta and making their alternative voice system available to the masses to allow deep dialing to their growing database of companies. This is a great service and as it grows it may very well force companies to make their IVRs more customer centric if they want them to remain relevant. Fonolo has gone an additional step and made a Developer API available. I have taken this API and created the Fonolo Ruby Library on Github.
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What is great about this API is that not only does it allow you to place calls via their service using JSON-RPC, it also allows you to retrieve the structure of that company's IVR. You may see an example here. This allows for developers to embed the capabilities in some interesting ways. While Fonolo in the US & Canada relieves frustration and reduces time wasted, making this service available internationally could save real money. I remember my days in The Netherlands dealing with UPC, and the fact that I had to pay 10 Euro Cents per minute for the privilege of calling their customer service number to correct yet another one of their billing mistakes. And in those times that impenetrable IVR probably cost me the equivalent of a new bicycle. Last count I saw from December is that Fonolo had ~300 companies in their deep dialing database. The next step for Fonolo should be to crowdsource the build out of their database. Then we may see thousands of companies available to be deep dialed.
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