Voxeo Talks

If you’re tired of rummaging in your pockets, cup holders, and under your car seats for change when you have to utilize metered parking, you’re not alone. New Parking was founded with one mission in mind: create the easiest, most error-free cashless way to pay for metered parking. Six years after starting operations in 2006, the company has done just that and is steadily growing year after year. We recently spoke with co-founder, President and CEO Thomas Janacek to get a feel for how New Parking got started and how Voxeo’s technology empowered them to build a system other IVR vendors found daunting.

Overview:

New Parking was founded to offer a solution to a common problem – the inconvenience of paying for parking via coin-based meters. We were based in Silicon Valley at the time, and a friend (who happened to have a background in telecom and SMS predictive text technology) went on a short trip into Oakland to pick up some bread. In the process, he got a parking ticket. We realized there was a need for a quick, easy and cashless way to pay for metered parking. With cellphones becoming more ubiquitous at the time, paying by phone seemed like a practical solution.

How are you specifically solving this problem?

We made the system simple, with as little time and user input required as possible. In cities where our technology is installed, once someone calls our system, all they have to do is indicate their parking meter ID number and they are registered as paid, and also given information on whether the meter has any maximum time limits. Meter readers can easily tell which meters are paid via New Parking. For first-time users of the system, we provide a free first hour of parking – our system sends them a text message so they can easily register on our system by calling back or going to our website. We have about 5-10% new users and a high conversion rate to regular users, due to the system’s ease of use and simple conversion process.

Why did you build with Voxeo?

We built the voice layer of the system with Voxeo technology because of the quality of the platform, and the speed of development. The IVR application we designed has a high level of complexity in terms of the interactions required with the voice layer.  Of the five companies we approached, Voxeo was the only one that ‘got it’. Larger telecom vendors had demanded a retainer to even spec out a workable version of the application. Using Voxeo, we were able to build the app in three weeks – for approximately the same cost that others had required merely as a retainer. Voxeo also makes it easy for us to set up local access numbers for each of our customers, such as a 561 number for the meters we manage for the City of Palm Beach.

What’s up next for New Parking?

We have begun exploring some other markets, including the ability to hook our technology up with electric vehicle charging stations, which would allow drivers of electric cars to pay for a recharge as easily as they pay to park.

To learn more, visit the New Parking website.

By now, you’ve assuredly heard about Pinterest. Social Media Club Orlando met at Voxeo last night and discussed the wide world of Pinterest, and how marketers might want to use this new tool.  Pinterest allows you to digitally collect and curate “pinboards” – sort of like digital scrapbooks – centering around a particular topic, with some of the most popular subjects on the site being food, travel, fashion, home design and other aesthetically-friendly topics.

Established in March 2010, the site has grown rapidly and logged over eleven million unique visitors in January 2012, with a typical visitor spending over 100 minutes on the site in the month. Researchers at comScore report that the site’s demographic is about two-thirds female, and the most popular region for using the site is the Midwest. If you’re into recipes, do-it-yourself home decor or planning a wedding, checking out Pinterest for your own personal use is a no-brainer. But given the rapid growth in users, the “stickiness” of the concept and the site’s demographics – it’s worth thinking about whether Pinterest is a right fit for your business, as well.

A few questions you might ask yourself before you start pinning on a professional level:

- Do I have a product I want to showcase? Pinterest isn’t a site for tons of marketing verbiage or a hard-sell message – in fact, pushing your own material too aggressively is against the site’s terms of service – so you stand the best chance of doing well if your core product has a lot of visual interest. Indie and vintage marketplace Etsy is an excellent example, using Pinterest to curate a mix of products offered for sale on their site in addition to art, fashion and other related ideas. Etsy now has over 50,000 followers on the site. Many retailers are seeing referral traffic from Pinterest as they and others share their products, and large brands like Gap are also getting into the mix with their own Pinterest presences.

- Am I part of someone’s planning process? If you provide services, photos of your final product can inspire a potential customer to click. This would be equally true if you were in event planning, construction or even if you were just trying to help someone decide what’s for dinner (a personal favorite: Saveur, whose pinboards can help you pick out drinks and dinner, then get you the recipes when you click through). And those in the design business, from graphic designers to wedding planners, can consider Pinterest another form of a portfolio.

- What can I create that someone will inherently want to share? If you don’t think your product or service lends itself to one of the first two points, take a look at what your customers are doing. If it qualifies, re-”pin” them and then re-think what you can share around those concepts. Another popular item to share on Pinterest is an infographic, so brainstorm how those might showcase what your business does in a unique and visual manner.

Even if you aren’t out there ravenously “pinning” everything in sight, you can always use Pinterest to get ideas or to create curated collections that support your own business processes. Our Marketing team is all over this concept – for example, our marketing director Kim created this Voxeo Party Planning pinboard to collect some of her favorite items we’ve used at events like our Customer Summit.

And once you’ve started with Pinterest, the next step is to make it as easy and fun as possible for your customers to get out there and Pin, as well, particularly if you’re a retailer. Just like Twitter’s “tweet” and Facebooks’ “like” buttons, you can add a Pinterest “pin” button to your pages to encourage sharing. Some brands have also created contests specifically for those sharing the brand’s content on Pinterest.

The Wall Street Journal wrote up Pinterest this week, citing several businesses that were starting to see a return on the time they invested in the site, such as this wedding-related retailer:

“Our traffic converts to sales,” said Amy Squires, co-founder of The Wedding Chicks LLC, which posted about $540,000 in revenue last year, up from $340,000 in 2010. The four-year-old online retailer of wedding-party gifts, which joined Pinterest last summer, said Pinterest now brings in more than double as many monthly visitors to its website than Facebook and Twitter.

Like many startups in the social sharing arena, Pinterest itself doesn’t have its strategy yet in place for how it plans to monetize its own site, but with its rapidly growing user base it may be an area of opportunity for your business to get more engaged with your customers in a highly visual, interactive manner. Have you given Pinterest a try either personally or professionally? If so, let us know what you’ve found useful (or not useful) about the Pinterest experience!

Are you looking for an easy, customizable solution to communicate with your customers across voice, text messaging, email and other channels? OneReach uses Voxeo’s carrier-grade platform to unify these communication channels and let you reach customers with meaningful information, in the way they want to be reached – giving small and medium businesses the same kind of access to multichannel messaging as enterprise customers.

Overview:

OneReach was created to make digital communications accessible to the common business person. We were faced with a client who needed a custom communications solution to handle their inbound phone calls without losing any prospective customers. There was nothing readily available: all of the solutions were costly, technically complex and didn’t fully support multichannel integration. After building a solution for this client, we realized there were probably many other SMBs in the same situation that would benefit from having a streamlined, simple way to access the kind of communications technology previously reserved for big businesses with large development budgets.

How are you specifically solving this?

We built OneReach from the ground up with full integration of multiple channels (e.g., voice, email and text messaging). Our FlowBuilder visual development environment allows anyone, even non-technical people to build powerful communications applications, including the ability to integrate with an API or website. In order to increase relevance and value to the customer, our system allows for the integration of external data sources, the ability to set up  multi-message campaigns on a timeline and to leverage multiple channels to match customers’ communication preferences.

Current customer applications run the gamut from very traditional, marketing lead tracking through dedicated phone numbers, to multi-channel applications used to increase donations and event participation within non-profit organizations, to building out a communications infrastructure in rural communities in Uganda to provide health information and services.

Why did you build with Voxeo?

Voxeo offers us a carrier-grade platform with unmatched reliability, and also has the multi-channel integration we were looking for when we designed OneReach. The obsession with customer service at Voxeo has mirrored what we strive for at OneReach, as well. We also appreciated the ability to build and test at no cost when we were developing the solution.

What’s up next for OneReach?

We’re continuing to innovate and add new features to our core product. In future releases, we plan to deploy industry-specific templates, making it easy for businesses to choose a template that suits their vertical – retail, healthcare, financial – and quickly and easily customize voice and text message prompts to set up notifications, surveys and other common tasks. Additionally, we’re building a user community around our product, including the ability for businesses to build their own templates and then share them with other users. We’re adding seamless CRM integration, and we’re rounding out our integration with social network tools by allowing social network updates to be created and scheduled directly within the OneReach application.

Demo:

For more information, visit OneReach’s website, or contact OneReach at 866-709-0482 or sales@onereach.com.

With all the current explosion of news about the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook, I thought I’d just post a reminder that Voxeo is on FriendFeed at:

http://friendfeed.com/voxeo

We started using Friendfeed back in May 2008 and, as I wrote then, primarily use it for aggregation of all our online content. If you are a Friendfeed user – or are just checking it out now – please do feel free to subscribe to our feed and keep up with what we are posting online and join in the conversations there.

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