Beyond Voice - The Encoded Blog

New Partner Programme to help your customers beat the recession

Encoded has today announced that it has launched its new Channel Partner Programme.  We have enjoyed continued and sustained growth for the last seven years, and we are looking for partners to share in our success. 

The launch of the programme has given me an excellent opportunity to write a few words about how I believe you too could benefit. Whilst we have used resellers for many years, the formalisation of the partnership programme gives you greater flexibility in cross-selling additional solutions that complement your existing sales into your clients - whilst also achieving healthy margins of 30%+, flexible payment options and continued revenue streams through contracted support agreements.

So why now?

In October 2008 we recorded our highest ever number of sales enquiries. At a time when the world's economy is slowing down and bracing for impact, Encoded's products and solutions are proving a lifeline to businesses needing to cut costs and ring-fence their customers.  This offers consultants, system integrators and VARs a unique opportunity to continue growing their business through this difficult period with a new and exciting portfolio of industry proven products.

Over the years we have amassed a wide collection of case studies and testimonials from happy customers that are made available to resellers allowing them to demonstrate to their clients how they too could benefit from Encoded's award winning services.

But everyone is tightening their belts!

Cutting costs and saving money is precisely what our products offer, and customers usually see a return on investment within just 6-9 months which makes our proposition very attractive.  For example, our automated payment solution, used for processing credit and debit card transactions without operator assistance, slashes costs by up to 80% and often improves cash flow by 100%.

Is the partnership programme for everyone?

No. We have laid out extremely rigorous acceptance criteria to ensure that our chosen partners are the best in their industry and can offer their customers added value through our products and solutions. 

Potential candidates for our channel partner programme include telephony, data and IT specialists, fulfilment and marketing agencies, PBX installers, systems integrators, telecommunication service providers, fixed and wireless telco networks.

If you're interested in joining the partnership programme then please call me or a member of my team on 08000 144 355.

Security Crisis #94: "Can I have the long number on your card?"

I recently experienced what is probably an everyday occurrence, but it still rather shocked me.  I was on a packed commuter train when a young lady made a phone call, talked for a bit about some purchase she had made, and then proceeded to rattle off all her personal information: name; address; date of birth; credit card details. 

Anyone in our carriage could have taken down those details and gone on a wild spending spree - and with the ubiquity of mobile internet probably cleaned out her account by the time she got off the train.

There should be just as many rules, and equally strict penalties, for companies that allow customers to read out their details over the phone as there are for online card payment transactions. 

Jive IVR platform joins the Open Source Community

We’ve recently released an open-sourced API named Jive, so I thought I’d take the time to write a little bit about it to let you know what it is, and what we’re trying to do with it.

The world's first IVR SpinVox integration

We were pleased to achieve the first integration of SpinVox technology into an IVR application recently.  SpinVox is a great tool for converting voicemail (or in fact any single-party speech stream) into text, with amazing accuracy results (they boast of 95%+, and our testing certainly matched that).