One of the fastest growing trends in the Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) space is application customization. Organizations no longer need to search for a collaboration product that meets all of their requirements right out of the box. Instead, they can now leverage a partner or their own DevOps team to create custom collaboration applications to meet their specific requirements. Cisco, with its recent acquisition of Tropo, has now better positioned itself to be a major player in this Collaboration Platform-as-a-Service (cPaaS) market.
Tropo provides an open Application Program Interface (API), cloud-based platform that makes it easy to create custom applications with the ability to communicate via voice and text messaging. Tropo gives organizations the ability to enhance customer interactions by creating Tropo applications or integrating existing applications via API integrations to the Tropo platform. Because Tropo is cloud-based, companies do not need to purchase any hardware or rack space to integrate the solution into their existing environment. Tropo provides scripting flexibility by supporting many scripting languages including, but not limited to, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP and Groovy.
Tropo’s platform provides enhanced feature functionality to any collaboration application, including the following:
- Ability to make and receive calls
- Sending and receiving text messages
- Transcription of voice to text
- Transcription of text to voice
- Call recording capabilities
- Call conferencing
- Speech recognition
One great benefit of Tropo is that it provides phone numbers for 42 countries, allowing a company to provide local numbers for their applications based on their customer’s location without having to contract with a telecommunications provider. People are more likely to answer a call from a number that is local to them rather than a toll-free or out-of-state number. So, for example, a nationwide hotel chain could create a Tropo application to make outbound calls to customers to confirm or remind them of upcoming reservations and make that call using a phone number local to each customer. This can lead to a higher answer rate, more customers receiving the desired message, and, in turn, a better overall customer service experience.
Other Tropo use cases include:
- Customer service surveys, inbound calls or outbound calls
- Speech Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to route callers to correct destinations
- Appointment reminders via text of phone call
- Confirmation text messages for orders placed
In an upcoming post, I’ll demonstrate how to create a simple inbound voice application using Tropo.
GTRI provides the expertise to assist your organization with custom scripting to integrate your application into the Tropo cloud. For more information on how Tropo and Cisco can transform your customer’s interactions, contact us.
Bill Donovan is a Consulting Engineer with Professional Services at GTRI.
