Ringio – Empowering businesses to communicate effectively
Every day, as many as a billion phone calls are made to small- and medium-size businesses in the United States. But the resulting experiences are not necessarily pleasant. Callers can find themselves ensnared in frustrating voice mail systems, misrouted or mishandled. The business employees, meanwhile, often struggle to manage the onslaught of calls they receive and determine which of their callers’ needs are most pressing.
Michael Zirngibl, Sam Aparicio and Ashish Soni are determined to change that scenario considerably by uplifting the caller experience and accelerating speed to satisfaction. Their new company, Herndon, Va.-based Ringio, launched in April 2010 and is the first cloud-based Rich Calling Service that intelligently routes calls to any phone in the world while displaying relevant information about the caller on a desktop PC or mobile phone. For small- and medium-size businesses, this convergence of conversation with context can be the key to improving customer service and communication.
A custom-made team
Prior to creating Ringio, Zirngibl, Aparicio and Soni were CEO, CTO and VP of Technology & Operations respectively at Angel.com, a successful speech- and interactive-voice-response (IVR) provider. The three worked together there for more than 10 years, building Angel.com into prominence as a provider of automated IVR & call-center solutions for medium and large businesses.
While their forte together has been creation, launch and monetization of Software as a Service (Saas) applications, each brings an important element to their new venture. Zirngibl, Chairman of Ringio, is an accomplished inventor who holds more than 30-voice technology patents. Aparicio, Ringio’s CEO, is a sought-after speaker at technology events and the author of numerous articles on technology, product design and management. At Angel.com, he designed and implemented the company’s Virtual Call Center. Soni, Ringio’s CTO & President, is an expert in building high-availability, scalable, cloud computing systems. He has managed more than 40 major software releases.
There was a time, Zirngibl said, when life at Angel.com seemed nearly perfect. But he, Aparicio and Soni all have entrepreneurial spirits. Eventually, the hunger to create something new started to surface. “We realized there were still a lot of opportunities out there,” Zirngibl said. They felt confident that with a great deal of work – and their combined technological expertise – they could build something unique that addressed a widespread need. The result was Ringio.
The human element
Ringio offers users an affordable, simple-to-use solution, one that rescues small and mid-size operations from the pitfalls of telephony limitations while equipping them better for a fundamental construct for SMB success: turning phone conversations into opportunities for revenue generation and deeper, lasting relationships with callers.
“There has been movement in recent years toward electronic communications through sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Zirngibl said. “But there’s still tremendous value in a traditional phone call, in interaction between two humans.”
Ringio’s goal is to give employees of small- and medium-size businesses the information they need about callers, when they need it, do a better job with those interactions and, as a result, serve their customers better.
