Rich Calling And Collaboration for SMBs: Ringio Launches

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For many reasons, last but not least the volcano’s ash cloud that is blocking Europe these days, I couldn’t attend eComm America, taking place these days near San Francisco.

However, I’ve been following the Twitter stream coming from eComm‘s attendees and speakers and took a look at some new services launched during the show. Ringio is definitely one that caught my attention.

Ringio aims to offer advanced rich calling and collaboration features, tipically designed for enterprises, to the SMB market. A tour of the service immediately gives you an idea on how powerful their platform is and the set of features is impressive. Moreover, I really like how the UI is designed, something critical to make the learning time for users as short as possible.

I signed up for a free trial and the configuration has been very easy. I inserted the phone number I wanted to be called to and selected a local US number. Everything is offered as SaaS, nothing has to be installed in the company’s premises (definitely a plus!). By default, two departments are assigned to my company (and to each user), Sales and Client Service. When someone dials that number, an IVR offers the ability to select the department to contact. I initially inserted an italian number as the main number to receive calls but, being italian, it doesn’t work, so I changed it and  put in my Google Voice number, configured on my desktop VoIP phone.

After having installed theit AIR desktop app on my Mac, I then tried to call the number assigned by Ringio to my company. I immediately got a popup informing that I was receiving a call where I could press “answer”. Then, Ringio redirected the call to the phone number provided during the signup process. If the caller’s CLI was on my address book (that could be Google Contacts), all the information of the caller would have been shown on my desktop app.

The cool thing is that the second time I tried to call, the welcome voice message, through text to speech, spelled the name of my company and asked me to press 1 if I wanted to talk to Luca again! Wonderful user experience…

I haven’t had enough time to try the service more, but it’s definitely powerful and very promising (plus, an Android app is available to take calls from a mobile phone). In particular, I appreciated the ease to use and nice user interface. I’m pretty sure we’ll heard about Ringio again very soon… Mmm, Google, Google Contacts, Android… isn’t it a wonderful companion of Google Voice for SMBs? (hint…).

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Tagged as: ecomm, Google, ringio, smb, Telephony, VoIP