Ifbyphone Becomes DialogTech
Ifbyphone, a provider of voice-based call center and marketing automation solutions, has undergone a corporate rebranding, relaunching today as DialogTech. This evolution follows the company's acquisition of Mongoose Metrics late last year.
The move, says Irv Shapiro, CEO and chief technology officer at DialogTech, reflects larger industry trends around phone use. "The phone is not going away," he states. "As humans, we still want to talk to one another."
What has changed, though, is the way in which many conversations happen. The power of conversation, Shapiro maintains, is no longer just about the phone.
"We're not just a phone company," he says. "We provide a whole new way to think about voice.
"For the past three or four years, we've been very focused on voice, but our name disabled us," he continues. "Because we were called Ifbyphone, people thought we were a PBX provider, and we're not."
In fact, the company's cloud-based technology, bundled together in a suite called Voice360, includes self-service interactive voice response, call analytics, call tracking, contextual routing, call management, and outbound notification systems.
The company, Shapiro adds, is now "coming out of stealth mode" and has reached critical mass. "We are processing about 25 million to 30 million phone calls per month," he says.
Shapiro says DialogTech is looking to do for the voice industry what Salesforce.com did for the CRM industry. "Salesforce decoupled the application from the infrastructure," he explains. "We do not care what PBX you are on or how much money you spent on it. We're delivering a suite of applications that decouple voice from the infrastructure and IT departments."
In conjunction with today’s announcement, DialogTech also unveiled LeadFlow, an advanced call routing and attribution solution built specifically for lead generation and digital marketers. LeadFlow is part of DialogTech’s Voice360 platform.
LeadFlow enables callers from any marketing channel to be connected live with the right lead buyers right away. LeadFlow provides clear attribution for every phone lead generated, as well as unique visibility into the duration and outcome of every call, to appropriately compensate sellers for every valid phone lead.
Voice-based conversations like this, Shapiro says, continue to be the most effective vehicle businesses have for connecting with consumers and driving revenue growth.
“Call monetization isn’t new, nor are leads-based marketplaces, but bringing the two together with a tool to quickly build your own voice-based marketplace is,” said Mike Boland, chief analyst at BIA/Kelsey, in a statement. “Meanwhile, the value of voice continues to grow, especially in high-value verticals with high-consideration purchases and complexity. Even in a digital age, that isn’t going away.”
Shapiro agrees, of course. "All the general experts in the call center world who said phone calls would be obsolete were wrong," he states. "We're still seeing a huge volume of phone calls."