Bells Are Ringing – New SpinVox A-La-Carte Service in Canada

Quiz time! What will CAN$5 buy you? Hmm, let’s see. Well, it will get you about five  songs on iTunes, one  venti mochachino at Starbucks and about two-and-a- half movie rentals from Blockbuster. Or, for CAN$5/month Bell Mobility customers can start enjoying the benefits of reading their voice messages as text and say ‘goodbye!’ to the archaic thing known as voicemail.

That means no more scrambling for pens or paper to scribble down messages for a start.  And given we are a texting society there is now the huge convenience of being able to reply to voice messages via text. Now, that’s great for parents with kids who say they couldn’t hear or return their call from the mall/party because it was too noisy…messages are received, and can be returned, as text! Parents win…and, well, kids….they get to text Mom and Dad back.

So to recap, Bell Mobility customers can now subscribe to Bell Voicemail to Text powered by SpinVox and get unlimited voice-to-text messages for CAN$5/month. Pretty cool, eh?

Asking yourself ‘how do I sign up’? Just ring up Bell Mobility and ask for the new Voicemail to Text service. And you can watch a demo of the new service here.

Attention online shoppers!  Today Broadsoft opened up a new eCommerce-enabled marketplace that makes it super simple for visitors to directly browse and purchase communications applications and services – such as SpinVox Voicemail-to-Text.

As part of the mission of the new Xtended Marketplace, Broadsoft will focus efforts on making available applications and services that ‘deliver value, solve real-life challenges and meet the lifestyle of users by providing a more integrated communications experience for businesses and consumers’.

SpinVox Voicemail-to-Text is one of three featured services/applications available in this respect.  The new Xtended Marketplace is currently in beta phase with a full launch scheduled for Q1 2010,

In the (paraphrased) words of Broadsoft, “The launch of the BroadSoft Marketplace is a significant milestone in the IP communications industry… service providers can immediately capitalize on and monetize the creative innovation of this developer community, while delivering value-added communications applications to their subscribers.”

If you happen to be in Scottsdale on 25-28^th October or are already attending the Broadsoft Connections Conference stop by the ‘Show Me The Apps’ session where Broadsoft will demo the online purchasing and provisioning of the new marketplace. And you can read more about it here.

The dreaded red message light at work. You’re on a marathon conference call at your desk and your heart sinks as you watch call after call roll over to voicemail and the glaring red message light starts shouting for your attention.  You know that when you finally wrap the call and prepare to dive into all the action items you’ve just acquired there are still a pile of messages to wade through, write down, call back or forward to a colleague.

Now imagine this. The same marathon conference call, but now every message received is automatically converted to text and sent to your email InBox. Almost immediately you know who was calling and why – and all of the contact information is already in email – no pens or paper to find and keep up with – just copy and paste to Contacts folder as needed. And you can follow-up the messages by email, text or even IM while still on the call.

So that’s what happens when voice to text powers Unified Communications on your desktop. Imagine what happens when it’s applied to call centre environments. You call a contact centre and the agents are busy.  You leave a message and receive a call back quickly from the right contact for your inquiry who is already briefed on your issue as your message has been converted to text it’s able to be readily assessed, prioritized and sent to them in a form they can quickly consume– speeding time to resolution and reducing the time you have to hold on the phone while being transferred from contact to contact explaining the reason for your inquiry each time.

Seems like a no-brainer idea, right? We thought so too. That’s why SpinVox started working with some of the best Unified Communications platform providers in the world, such as Avaya, and have deployed in contact centres for some of the best known brands – such as Boots.

Stay tuned to this blog for future updates to SpinVox happenings in UC and upcoming events where you can meet with us in person and learn more. Or, for more information now contact us.

Perhaps one of the most mobile groups of professionals working today is in the real estate industry. They’re always in the field, rarely in the office and always need to be connected to clients, other agents, mortgage lending firms, surveyors, lawyers and more. And with home sales in the U.S. on a steady rise, according to the National Association of Realtors in an August announcement, and housing prices set to rise among limited housing supply in Australia, and signs of steady recovery in the UK, the pace for real estate agents around the world is looking to get even busier and more competitive.

The customer service that results from multi-tasking and keeping track of discussions, decisions and follow-up action items is essential to a real estate agent’s success. Fortunately voice-to-text services available today are helping many real estate agents work more efficiently, increase productivity and improve client communications.

For example, real estate agents on a service such as SpinVox can use their mobile phone to speak themselves a voice-to- email message that captures in near real-time the synopsis of a conversation, delivery request or decision whereas before it may have taken hours before an agent could write up notes for their files. Now the information is waiting for them in their email InBox and includes day/time stamp of when notes were made.

Or let’s say the agent just put in a bid for a house and is heading into a meeting where it would be inappropriate to take a call or dial into a voicemail – with voicemail-to-text the agent can now read the voice message content during the meeting and know immediately what, if any, action may be needed or can forward to an assistant for immediate follow-up.

A great tool for communications with clients, voice-to-text services can also be used to speak a text message to a client or colleague recapping a conversation or confirming next steps for a home sale. And when the client leaves a voice message they know it will be received by the agent in text format – so the agent is always available to the client. Having been involved in the home buying and selling process a few times, as a client that kind of follow-up and availability really lets me know the agent is thinking about me and driving the home buying/selling process forward. And as stressful as home buying and selling can be – anything that puts the client’s mind at ease is improving the customer experience and proving the value of the agent!

And if all these benefits weren’t enough – with all the notes and messages captured in text format they are easily organized, archived and shared with colleagues or clients as needed – reducing the number of papers and documents that must be kept up with throughout the day!

Have you experienced voice-to-text in your day-to-day life be it for business or personal use or are you using it to improve customer service in your business? We would love to hear from you on your experience — please drop us a comment…!

In today’s blog we talk with Mark Smith CEO of ipadio.

ipadio allows you to broadcast from any phone to the Internet live. Phone blog, collect audio data, record and update the world, or simply let your mates know what you’re doing.

ipadio is integrated with a variety of Social Media & Blogging platforms and has used the SpinVox API to ensure callers also have the option to use SpinVox voice to text conversion to produce title, tags and a transcript for their phone blogs or `phlogs` as they are known. See the results of our conversation below!