Meet InVox, the new online IVR

The hosted PBX provider that last week was known as 800PBX has been relaunched as InVox, a provider of Web-based interactive voice response (IVRs) platforms for small businesses.

The company’s platform, now being beta-tested, combines a range of speech recognition and IP features for managing customer calls. Designed for companies with 10 to 50 extensions, its online user interface is fairly simple and intuitive, with drag-and-drop controls that let users change features and call-routing policies simply by clicking a mouse over a flowchart diagram of the path that they want incoming calls to take.

The platform is based on Ajax, the combination of asynchronous JavaScript and XML programming languages. It interoperates with the voice platforms of Skype, Google Voice, Gizmo5 and Yap as well as the customer relationship management platforms of Saleforce.com, SugarCRM and Zoho.

“Everything resides in the cloud,” said Manohar Chapalamadugu, InVox’s chief technology officer.

As calls come in, the system can immediately identify callers through online white-page searches and cross-reference that identity with the business’s own records. For example, it can check with Google Calendar to see if a caller has an upcoming appointment, remind them of it and ask if they need to cancel or reschedule. Callers can be directed to leave voicemails, which can be transcribed and emailed to the appropriate person.

By asking callers for their zip code, the program can help callers find stores nearest them. And it can be programmed to make automatic collections calls to customers that haven’t paid their bills. It can even accept payment over the phone during those collection calls, using voice recognition and prompting callers for credit card information, for example.

So how is the quality of the calls, given that they’ll be employing speech recognition in financial transactions?
“When we talk about the cloud, we’re sitting in 60 Hudson,” said Mike Loftus, InVox’s chief executive officer, referring to the carrier hotel in lower Manhattan. “We’re right in the middle of the universe relative to IP telephony, so we can get the best quality possible. We’ve got several years of this under our belt. We understand the importance of the quality of the connection. That’s why we’ve gone to the expense of being in 60 Hudson.”

InVox’s founders hope to make the service generally available in mid-October at prices ranging from $250 to $1000 a month, depending on the feature set and extensions. And it is currently searching for value-added reseller partners.