First posted on CIOReview - October 2016
Enterprises today pay increasing attention to improving the customer experience as they interact with customers across multiple platforms and media-types. “Customers appreciate when a business flexes to meet their preferred communication style, with as little friction as possible,” begins Mike Oeth, CEO and Co-founder, OnSIP.
While the Unified Communications industry has promised integrated voice, video, and chat solutions through the years, OnSIP believes competitors have mainly replicated traditional telecommunications over TCP/IP and innovated primarily in areas of intracompany collaboration. For this reason, the company focuses on moving customer communications off the PSTN and onto the web, delivering pure Over The Top (OTT) communications. “OnSIP customers can place call buttons on their website and allow their visitors to make secure voice or video calls right in their browser, no phone necessary,” delineates Oeth.
More OTT applications continue to emerge with the increased adoption of WebRTC, an open source project by Google that gives supporting browsers direct access to a device’s speaker, microphone, and video camera. OnSIP was named a WebRTC Pioneer by TMC and is a long-time contributor to the open source community, which the company credits for its ability to innovate in this space.
“Our WebRTC-based application InstaCall boosts conversions and customer satisfaction by removing the friction of dialing and the traditional phone tree. Callers can click to video call from their browser and watch video-on-hold content as they wait for an agent. Agents can answer the call prepared with contextual caller information, such as what’s in their shopping cart.”
OnSIP provides a cloud based phone system without the traditional high cost, burden, and inflexibility. Established in 2004, the company has built a geographically distributed platform (patent) with redundant carriers, Tier 1 Internet connections, and upstream carriers to provide reliable service. In the case of a suboptimal event at one datacenter, OnSIP’s platform architecture allows the company to move customers to another datacenter without service interruption, as was evidenced during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The firm is a full range provider of smart business phone system features like voicemail to email, auto attendants, and ring groups, to name a few, along with leading edge add-ons. For instance, the company offers a free UC interface, the OnSIP app, that acts as a business-grade phone, video chat solution, messaging app, queue monitor, and presence indicator- all in the browser. Recently, the company launched a Slack integration in the OnSIP app, adding to a list of integrations that include: Zendesk, Highrise, Salesforce, Chrome, Google Analytics, and more. OnSIP also provides call center applications like Enhanced Queues, a solution that enables queue supervisors to gain real-time insights into their call center activities.
The company’s unique approach to UCaaS is showcased by the adoption of OnSIP’s Pay As You Go pricing plan by MongoDB. The customer’s business was rapidly expanding, but their operations didn’t require much external calling. Using other UCaaS providers, the company’s phone bill would have expanded with the number of phones added to the system. But with OnSIP’s Pay as You Go Plan, MongoDB was able to save by paying only for external calls and features used. The unique Pay As You Go Plan charges no fee per user, phone, extension, or in-network call. OnSIP is able to offer this plan because of their unique platform design.
As for what’s next for the company, OnSIP is going to continue to enhance their web applications while also enabling developers to build voice, video, and messaging applications of their own by leveraging the OnSIP platform. The company released their Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) in 2014 along with an open source JavaScript library, SIP.js. “We strongly support open source technology, and one investment we have made towards that is sharing SIP.js with the community so that we can continue to innovate together,” concludes Oeth.