Phone.com Debuts its API at ‘All About the API’ Conference
Phone.com, located at the NJIT Enterprise Development Center (Newark), released a new version of its application programming interface (API) this July, at TMC’s “All About the API” conference and exhibition in Las Vegas.
The company described its API as being hooked into its fully featured telephone system. Alon Cohen, CTO and executive vice-president, said that customers commonly use the API to integrate their Phone.com system into other business platforms. The most common request is actually customer relationship management (CRM) integration, he noted.
“The second use that we often see has to do with SMS send and receive for different applications. We also see other interesting integrations where people use their Phone.com systems to generate calls for invoice collections, so that the customer who has not been paying gets a call that gives him an option to either pay or talk to a customer support agent, and so on.”
Phone.com cofounder and CEO Ari Rabban noted that year over year, “we see more business moving to the cloud. A big part of the appeal is the ability to customize your solution.” With most small business phone providers, users can’t even customize phone handling rules. Phone.com will work with clients to create custom solutions and new services for their customers, he said.
One customer using the Phone.com APIs in a unique way is AppCard (New York, N.Y.), according to Dan Winnick, an engineer who is AppCard’s head of implementation. “Our monitoring system can detect an offline card reader and use an API to generate a call to the store in order to proactively help the business owner resolve the problem,” generated by the offline system. “Similarly, when a customer’s card is declined, we can initiate a call to the customer allowing them to update their information.” The company has also integrated Phone.com’s API into its CRM system.
