Cloud Telephony Experiments

Since cashless economy and demonetization has taken over the collective mindest of the nation I started thinking of what we can do to help. After all, we are also patriots :) So since we are in the cloud telephony space, I thought of outlining a flow which can be adopted by wallet companies to enable payment by IVR . Complete payment on the phone using bank accounts is hard now because of the security restrictions and regulations created by the banks. Though theoretically its possible using UPI. But for this blog lets look at wallet to wallet transfer. Give a missed call to pay flow which will allow cash transfer: Share a 1-800 number for customers to give a missed call to . (or give a virtual DID to a business) When the customer gives a missed call, he gets a call back. IVR asks him to say/enter phone number of the business to pay to. ( KooKoo has the capability to recognize 10 digit phone numbers in Hindi and English). IVR asks to enter the amount to pay. IVR as...

With the emergence of inbound marketing, Inside sales has become a prominent function contributing to a company’s growth. Do you have a robust and productive inside sales process? As inside sales mostly happens over the call, tracking the sales calls is important to ensure timely review & feedback, to identify the right practices to be implemented. The Inside sales team was involved in selling 3 product of different pricing and it was important to understand which product is taking up how much of the rep’s time in the sales process. Ideally, a low value product should be given a proportionately lower effort from a direct contact perspective and push for more interaction via indirect channels like emails. Problem In order to improve the team’s efficiency & monitor productivity, the management was keen to review key metrics like How much effort is put on each product Number of calls made to close a lead for each products Which sales person is making maxim...

Adding telephony to your Zoho CRM Today most of the manufacturing companies have a CRM in order to capture the basic customer information and manage the customer life cycle. As we move ahead, to enhance customer experience and make conversation seamless, it is necessary to integrate telephony solution with CRM. Recently we integrated calling solution for a manufacturing company using Zoho CRM.  Background: A 40 yr old company primarily manufacturing fertilizer and other agri products. They have published a number where farmers as well as distributors can directly call  All the conversation are manually updated in the CRM. Problem- Lack of a telephony linkage with the CRM prevents the management from understanding what was the actual conversation which transpired between the Farmer & the agent. In the scenario that the agent changes historical records of the calls are lost along-with the context of the call. Lack of quality check of the calls being rece...

TV shows have always been a one way street. Its not without reason that the TV is known as the idiot box. But thats about to change with the advent of bots. Chat bots provide a medium where TV viewers can interact at real time with a TV show. Who knows maybe in the future viewers can even control the flow of a show using chat bots. Imagine you vote on live TV if a character is supposed to be killed off or not ;) Allow people to take videos of recipes and post it to be featured on Masterchef etc. The ideas are limitless. A small step was made in this direction recently when one of the biggest TV shows in India, Bigg Boss, started interacting with the viewers on FB messenger. A big thanks to our WPP partners, Tenth Avenue, for making this deal happen and also for the awesome creative ideas they bring to the table. So what does the Big Boss bot do? Viewers can get the basic show information like details about the contestant. Immediate & 24/7 response – Viewers will g...

When HUL came to us with an idea to implement a phone app to connect migrant workers for free, we took it as a challenge to make it happen as it was for a good cause. And we are proud of the final system which came up. When we ran a sample set of voices through different recognizers, we found that our system outperformed even the Google speech recognizer. Our success rate at recognizing phone numbers in Hindi and English ( all 10 digits) was almost 2 times that of Google. ( note : We ran the samples through Google's speech cloud to get their recognition rate) Granted, ours was a specialized system and Google's was generic, but hey, we still feel proud :) Challenges in Lo Kar Lo Baat : Generally, accuracy of speech recognition depends on many factors like; 1) channel property, speech sampling rate, speech coding 2) deviation in pattern due to effect of dialects, speaking rate and speaking style 3) effect of background In Lo Kar Lo Baat we had faced many...

We have always wanted to be a company which owns the full stack. That is the reason we built our own PRI cards, we built our own telephony stack and the web stack. As of today, we are adding one more layer in our KooKoo stack, Speech . You can now view all our speech products at http://speech.ozonetel.com This sub domain has been in the making for the last two years. We have already deployed our speech products on the KooKoo platform for a couple of very successful projects. And now, we have made it available for general release. All KooKoo developers can start using these speech products in their cloud telephony applications. In case you want this to be enabled for your account, please reach out to sales@ozonetel.com  These speech tools will help you to reduce agent cost by using speech recognition driven IVR flows for automated intuitive interaction with customers. They allow you to improve support by identifying callers using speaker verification . You can also do q...

The launch of UPI can be considered as a watershed moment. This has opened up a whole new way of sending and receiving payments and will surely lead to a lot of innovation. The API is really well designed for a government effort. But guess it was expected given the great efforts put in by a lot of volunteers. So,hats off to them. Whenever innovative things happen, you know KooKoo is not far behind :) So, in this blog post, I will show you an easy way to collect payments using a missed call. 1. Register for a KooKoo missed call account. and specify an app URL. You will receive a missed call number. 2. When some one calls on your missed call number, KooKoo makes a http request to your URL with the caller details. 3. Build UPI payment request URL based on specification provided by NCPI . So lets say your VPA is ozonetel@somebank and you need to request Rs.2, your request will be something like, upi://pay?pa=ozonetel@somebank&am=2 . 4. Send this link in an SMS back to the cal...