Ringio’s Latest Release – A Quick Look Under the Hood

If you have been visiting our website over the last few days, you might have noticed a few changes to both the design and content. Most notably, you may have seen our growing buzz section with a number of new articles written about our latest upgrade and the positive feedback we received from bloggers, journalist and analysts.

We also put out a press release last week in which we announced some of the highlights of the new functionality, but since you’re paying by the word on PR Newswire and most journalists have a notoriously short attention span, we could only scratch the surface of all the good stuff we packed into our latest product release.

Before we dig into the details, in the name of the entire Ringio team I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to the more than 300 businesses who signed up for our service in the last few months and who provided the feedback, ideas and focus for this release. We could not have done this without you (obviously) and hopefully you were excited to see some of your requested features appear  ‘magically’ in your account last week.

To shamelessly rip off the Microsoft commercial: Ringio 2 Was Your Idea!

So let me give you a quick run down of what we added and how you – as our current or future customers – can benefit from it.

Streamlined Sign-up Process

OK, we admit it. The process and the experience we put our initial beta customers through when first signing up was clunky at best. (We also heard ‘confusing’, ‘unusable’ and ‘Microsoft-like’. Ouch!). So while still not perfect, I think the new step-by-step wizard is a major step in the right direction. Please, try it yourself. (And yes, I did just try to trick you into signing up for a free trial ) Our stated design goal is that the setup for a 10-person company should take 10 minutes or less. So get out your stopwatch, and tell us how fast you can get it done!

Management Dashboard

The next thing we heard is that our users wanted a central dashboard from which they could get a quick overview of their entire Ringio setup, from which they could make changes with one-click access to all major feature groups. So here we go. I think the new design (see below) is pretty nice and clean. If you don’t think so, we don’t want to hear about it (just kidding).

Custom Greetings

Quite honestly, we really thought that every customer would instantly and inevitably fall in love with our ‘one-size fits all’ auto-attendant. It was clean, well organized, efficient and moderately smart … Oh, boy … did that work out well – NOT! Clearly another one we can safely put into the ‘feature prioritization brainfart’ category. By my rough estimate, more than 40% of our customers actually wanted their sparkling new Ringio phone system to sound exactly how their old system sounded (at least the main greeting) or finally get that professional recording by William Shatner or Liz Hurley. So go ahead, my friends, just ask Susan in Accounting, Auntie Helen or whatever voice ‘talent’ rocks your boat to record for you, then upload the file through the Ringio Admin Portal and you’re off to the races. You can obviously always revert back to the Voice of Ringio with a click of a button!

Personalized Greeting & Welcome Back

One of the reasons why the Ringio system might be (well, actually it certainly is) superior to any boring PBX you might have bought in the past is the option to let the Ringio system greet your known callers by name when they call your business. This alone makes Ringio the most polite and customer friendly small business phone solution out there. And while you might not find ‘polite’ or ‘customer friendly’ on many feature comparison charts yet, it’s key to our product philosophy of helping you create  ‘better business with every call’ – so we’re sticking with it! And to put some ‘Smart’ icing on the ‘Polite and Customer-friendly’ cake we also added the simply awesome ‘Welcome Back Routing’, which checks for every caller, who they have spoken with last in the company and if that employee is available right now connect them in an instant so both sides can continue their conversation. This one’s a winner for sure.

Route to Departments / All Users

Another feature we didn’t expect to bubble up to the top of our feature request list so quickly was the option for businesses to skip the auto-attendant part altogether and simply let the Ringio system find the next available employee. Another way of improving customer service by increasing the efficiency of getting a caller to a live person as quickly as possible, so we obviously loved the idea.

‘Silent Ringio’ – Put Ringio Behind Your Enterprise PBX or IVR

Take my word for it … this is one of the  ‘hidden gems’ of this release. By combining the ‘Custom Greeting’ with the ‘Route to All Users’ option, any company can now take advantage of Ringio’s Screen Pop and built-in CRM functionality without requiring major changes to whatever it uses as their big and expensive corporate phone or IVR system. All you have to do is upload a blank audio file, select the  ’Route to All Users’ option and then forward whatever option in your Corporate IVR your team is responsible for (Sales, Support or Accounting) to the Ringio number you selected. From now on you can control the schedule, the ‘smarts’, the tracking and everything that matters from your Ringio account. What makes this doubly interesting for many folks running Sales, Support or other teams at larger organizations is that at $25 per user / month, Ringio is about 20% of the cost of Virtual Call Center solutions with all the functionality you really need.

Most importantly all of these Routing options can now be conveniently configured from a single tab:

Bring Your Own PBX / Virtual Extensions

The folks at Ringio are all big fans of  ‘Going Green’. While we obviously believe that physical PBX ‘boxes’ are quickly following the path of rotary phones, cassette players and floppy disks, we also don’t want any of our customers to simply throw away their perfectly fine and dust-collecting PBXs in a manic frenzy … some of them might turn into collectors’ items eventually LOL. However, what we heard loud and clear from many beta participants, was that they actually want both (Shocker ). Keep their existing PBX until death (or the upcoming maintenance renewal bill) do them part, but start taking advantage of the killer Ringio features right away. Wish granted! Not only does Ringio now support the ability to use your existing PBX Extensions as default endpoints for your employees, it also now sports one of the most elegant and user friendly interfaces in the industry to define ‘Virtual Extensions’ for any number of employees in your company.

So to make this a little clearer:

• You can now set up a Ringio system in 10 minutes or less with all the bells and whistles that allows existing callers to dial the extensions they have gotten used to, then routing the calls through Ringio to the actual phone of the employee hanging off your 1970s PBX.
• If and when you decide to move any of your existing or new employees to the 21st century, you can do this with a single click of a button.
• No matter where your employees take the call (PBX or Mobile) they all can take advantage of all of Ringio’s Rich Calling features. Pretty good, huh!?

Caller Picture ID

Now this one, while definitely ranking towards the top of the ‘cool feature list’, is quite frankly still at a somewhat ‘betaish’ stage. What Picture ID does is that it actually displays a contact’s picture in both the Ringio Contact Manager as well as the Ringio Screen Pop, as long as such a picture can be found on any of the main social networks – at least that’s the plan. In full disclosure, we simply ran out of engineering time and didn’t want to hold up the entire release for a feature that most folks might classify as ‘nice to have’. So in order for it to work in its current stage, your contact actually must have a ‘Gravatar’ account (www.gravatar.com) tied to the email on file, which basically means that he or she is either a Super-Geek or a hardcore Super-Geek. If you’re desperate to get a glance of how Caller Picture ID works, just add me to your contact list in Ringio (Michael Zirngibl, work: 202-470 6515 email: michael@ringio.com) and my mugshot will appear. No offense taken if you delete the contact 3 seconds later. Give us a few weeks and we’ll fix the whole thing to include access to profile pics on Facebook and LinkedIn, which will be our first foray into Social CRM functionality. More on what’s coming in that area  in a later post …

Voicemail Caller Receipt

Have you ever left an important voicemail for somebody at a business wondering if they actually received it, just to ‘panic’ and then write a lengthy email basically repeating and paraphrasing exactly what you just told them 5 minutes ago? No? Well than this feature is simply not for you and you should just skip the following 15 sentences … If yes, read on and learn that we now give our customers the option to turn on Voicemail Receipt notifications for their account. Trust me, your customers will love this one … Turned on, any registered contact in Ringio leaving a message for you / your employees will instantly get an email with a link to the message they just left, giving them a) the peace of mind that their important message will show up at the top of your Ringio NEW voicemail list next time you log in and b) also giving them the option to simply forward the email back to you with a ‘little nudge’, just in case they feel your time to respond could use a little improvement. This one’s maybe a little out there, but we would love to hear how your customers react!

Plus: Other Stuff

Well, there’s a whole bunch more usability improvements like improved Contact Search, Endpoint Management, Auto-Attendant Configuration etc. etc. but they probably don’t warrant a full-blown benefit appraisal in this post, so let’s just cut it for now

I hope you can see that everyone here at Ringio is fully committed to making this the best small business phone solution on the planet. No seriously, that is the plan … no wink wink or smiley faces.  And while we’re certainly not there yet, I think you’ll be quite pleased with both the quality and speed of the functionality improvements we are putting out there for our customers.

So if you’re serious about treating your customers better with every phone call, sign up today and give Ringio a shot … If you feel like we’re still missing something, make sure to let us know.

That way, you could be part of our upcoming viral marketing campaign and claim that ‘Ringio 3 Was Your Idea!’ Cheers!

Michael