An article last week from RCR Wireless News reviewed a promotion from “IceBreakers” candy, where, after checking online to see if you’re a winner, calls your mobile phone and connects you to an IVR that lets you record a Karaoke that can be used as a ringtone. Here’s a snippet from from the article that explains how the IVR portion of the process works:

Once you select a song that you want to record and you’re ready to sing, the service dials up your handset and an IVR takes over (you still need your computer screen to have the lyrics at hand). You go through a brief timing exercise to account for latency, which consists of counting to eight along with the IVR, and get a few tips before you start (such as, make sure you have good reception). Then it’s three beeps, the music starts, and it’s time to use that handset as a microphone, and “give it all you’ve got!” as the perky IVR voice encourages you to do.

This proves that IVR can be fun. It’s also another interesting application of click-to-call.

I came across this today, and being in marketing, this is REALLY cool to me.  Here’s a great example of new and old medias coming together to create a great marketing campaign.  General Motors/Opel (European car maker) was releasing a new car at the end of last year and wanted to create some viral buzz about their now Astra TwinTop convertible.  They thought about an email campain, they thought about a viral video campaign, they thought about an IVR-based marketing campaign… then decided to combine all of these into one mega campaign.  Read the full details here >>

In a nutshell, they emailed their database of 80,000 customers to give them the option to opt in to a new and exciting promotion they were running.  Customers were asked to provide a few key pieces of information in their response, including their cell phone or desk phone number.  Within a few minutes of responding to that opt in email, the customer was sent another email with a link to a 1-minute funny video related to the new convertible.  And while watching the video, a phone call was placed to their number and the voice of the main character from the video started talking to them and asking them questions, individualized with their name, over the phone!  If the customer didn’t pick up the phone, a similar message was left for them.

Combine this with the viral effect of asking that customer to forward the email along to friends, complete with friends’ email addresses, names and phone numbers, and Opel’s response to the campaign was phenomenal.  They placed 454,000 outbound marketing calls from the video, had more than 2 million web visitors, and added more than 12,000 new names to their marketing database.

What a new and unique use of IVR in marketing, that delighted both customers and Opel with the response.  If you think about it, there are hundreds of ways to use IVR in marketing — that don’t involve interrupting dinner with telemarketing calls!  This is just one more unique use of IVR technology!

I’m sure most of you are familiar with click to call.  If you’re not, we talk about it in previous articles. In a nutshell, a person is browsing a website, clicks a button that brings up a form, the user enters their phone number, submits the form, and after a while they receive a call and are connected to a live operator. Pretty straight-forward, right?

At Angel, we’ve been brainstorming on ways to use click to call that are far more original and exciting than the few mainstream uses that are currently out there.

The current use of click to call mainly addresses the pain point of having the caller wait in a queue while an operator is freed up to take their call.  With click to call, the agent calls the prospect when they are available.  This frees up the prospect to use their time as they see fit, avoid wasting precious cell phone minutes, and perhaps most important, do away with the aggravation of being forced to hang on a telephone, listening to awful music and the even more awful fake apologetic messages from the IVR system.  Its value, in other words, is to streamline the process of connecting people.

The challenge, then, is to think of use cases where the value of click to call is not streamlining the process of connecting people, but something else. This can be pretty tricky because, frankly, there’s not much one can’t do over the web where it would make sense to leave the website to do over the phone. One thing we have come up with, though, that is not easy to do over the web is making voice recordings. There are obviously many applications that require recording a message that could benefit from click to call, for example, voice authorization, verbal agreements, automatically posted to the website you were browsing seconds before.

But someone might think, well, why not just pick up the phone and call? There are a few reasons. One is that if the call is initiated from the web, the phone application knows who you are and can send messages back to the website with the call status, letting you resume a process over the web that needed a piece completed over the phone, such as obtaining voice authorization. Another reason is to support users outside the country that may not be able to access a toll-free number and do not want to pay for an international call.

Yet another interesting use case which was inspired by the “Snakes on a Plane” application is the notion of “tell-a-friend” by phone. There are many tell-a-friend providers out there that let web users send information about a product or a news article to a friend’s email. But wouldn’t it be more compelling instead to have a call placed to the friend with an audio message from their favorite celebrity endorsing a new product or perhaps have a news item read to them over the phone?  Delivering jokes, which are usually far more compelling when heard than read, is another use case.  Pick a joke, enter your friend’s phone number, and off goes the call to your buddy!

Our product team is working on a whole suite of solutions and would love feedback and suggestions.

Technorati Tags: click to call, clicktocall, outbound, outbound ivr

In a recent Forrester research document titled: Twelve Technologies That Will Transform Online Retail (free registration required), Senior Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru identifies VOIP as a key driver of consumer adoption of online shopping. She says:

Click-to-call further reduces eCommerce friction. Unlike live chat, which many retailers already offer, VoIP allows consumers to connect directly from a Web site to a phone conversation, which can immediately help address consumer buying concerns, encourage upsells, and increase conversion from Web site visitors. The one drawback for most retailers? VoIP is not necessarily cost-efficient, as it necessitates additional labor: VoIP integrated into a Web site encourages more volume to a call center, which means more staff to handle the calls. For high-touch, high-consideration purchases, or ones where buyers and sellers are not that familiar with each other, this may be an investment well worth making.

She further illustrates her point by charting these technologies in 3 dimensions: internal IT involvement, vendor IT involvement and impact on customer retention and acquisition:

The list is remarkable, mainly because most of the technologies outlined are “in the edge”, and not entirely understood by decision makers. This has two implications for online retailers:

• To use the technology will require some risk taking and experimentation.
• Those who get it right will reap the rewards of differentiation from the competition.

Which leads me to Click to Call. The technology has great potential. The first implementations by companies like eStara, or LivePerson focused on connecting callers to call center agents. Not bad. But expensive. Next generation solutions based on voice automation can address the cost issue and add more value, with features like:

• Contextualization — the ability to know exactly where in the website the customer or prospect is, what they’re looking at, what they’ve tried.
• CRM integration — the ability to understand the current interaction as it relates to prior interactions
• Persistence — the ability to remember where things were left off in the prior interaction
• One-channelization or multimodality — the ability to define a task (e.g. checking out) that can be accomplished, in steps, partially over the web and partially over the phone, without missing a beat.

In addition, other than responding to customer or prospect initiated requests, Outbound IVR technology can do more:

• Let a customer know that a credit card authorization failed, and give them a chance to address the problem instead of cancelling the order (Sears.com’s preferred way to not serve)
• Ask a customer for feedback about a recent transaction, surveying them for satisfaction.
• Letting them know that a rare or scarce wish-list item is now in stock, in case they want to buy it.

So, if you’re in the market for a next-gen solution here are some questions to ask your vendor:

• Does your solution provide a mechanism for voice interactivity, or does it simply connect callers with agents?
• Can your solution plug in to my ordering and CRM systems and transact with them?
• Is it possible to create interactions that support the workflow of my customers?
• Since I will be experimenting to get the solution right, how easy is it to change set ups? Can my team make the changes?
• What kind of reporting and instrumentation do you offer? How can you help me understand what is working and what isn’t?

At Angel.com we’re experimenting with different ways to help our prospects get in touch. This screenshot, for example, illustrates the principle of contextualization, where a pop up captures, automatically, some context about the web page being viewed, to help in the routing of the call to the most appropriate group in the company:

Technorati Tags: click to call, clicktocall, customer service, customerservice, etail, forrester, ivr, online retail, onlineretail, outbound