Value Added Services Make The Difference: Mobivox

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Regular readers of my blog should know very well how fan I am of VoIP used not as a great way to make cheap calls only, but to provide new, innovative value added services to consumers and businesses (something my company has been doing for a few years now with our customer engagement service Sitofono). If the value of the service you provide is crystal clear, your customers are definitely willing to pay for it.

A few days ago I had the opportunity to talk to Peter Diedrich, CEO of Mobivox, and it turned to be a very interesting discussion, with Peter and me perfectly in the same wavelength. I  already wrote about Mobivox a couple of times in this blog, but this is the first time since the arrival of Peter with the role of CEO, previously held by Stephane Marceau, and of the contribution of Larry Lisser, a Telecom expert I had the opportunity to meet a couple of times during my trip to Silicon Valley.

In a nutshell, Mobivox is trying to leverage their voice recognition technology in order to provide users with much more than discounted phone calls. The key point is the way their are trying to reach a wide user base, that is by licensing their technology to big and small telecom operators, with different models depending on the operator they are dealing with. Peter called their technology a “Network Based Address Book” where users can easily call each other by simply dialing a local number and telling the name of the contact they want to call.
I asked him about the differences between Mobivox and similar (apparently) services, like Dial2Do, and Peter clarifies that they are rather focusing on the telephony/SMS side than integrating their service with social networks (Dial2Do lets you send a Tweet, for example) and thanks to an agreement with Voxbone, they have a  huge set of dial-in  numbers worldwide. They also launched the 883 iNum Exchange, “an innovative Global Toll Free VoIP exchange (883) enables users to receive reverse-charged calls from family, friends and colleagues”.

What’s particularly new here is that 883 is in fact a value-add service. One that supports an important social and business process (that of being reached anywhere), rather that one that simply and only reduces cost.

Moreover, Peter told me they are adding new services like group conferencing and also focusing on building sophisticated integrations with CRMs, making automation, usage statistics and users’ profiling a key component in their platform (Telecom CRM 2.0). A major benefit is also the ability to record the accent of the final user so that the system automatically self-trains to make sure the success in recognizing the user itself is above 99%.

They already have LOIs with different telecom operators – mobile operators / calling card players and we should expect major news in the following weeks.

I’ll definitely stay tuned for further developments and praise Mobivox for their efforts to finally take the label “cheap calls” and “free” away from VoIP.

Tagged as: Business, luca filigheddu, mobivox, Social network, Telecommunications, Telephony