Cluecon Sponsor YTel CEO & CTO: How Voice Providers Can Leverage AI & IOT

Suzanne Bowen : Monetizing IP Communications
Suzanne Bowen
37 yrs in telecom, teaching, blog & grant writing, biz development, marketing, & PR. Favorite moments in life involve time w/ family & friends, networking, IP communications industry verticals & horizontals, running, traveling, foreign languages
| 1. "Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition..." Barack Obama ..... 2. "One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain." By Thomas Sowell

Cluecon Sponsor YTel CEO & CTO: How Voice Providers Can Leverage AI & IOT

The best conferences and exhibitions are the ones in which we have had the chance to get to know some of people and companies, in advance, that will participate. Ytel is a Cluecon 2017 sponsor. The company recently sponsored the Million Dollar Shootout at charity golf tournament to benefit Anaheim-based charity, Caterina's Club. They were recently awarded Category Leader for X5 Cloud Contact Center by GetApp. I interviewed their CEO Nick Newsom and CTO/CIO Matt Grofsky to share more about them with you.

Nick_Newsom_2.jpgNick Newsom, CEO
Nick has been involved in phone technology for over 20 years. From his early days as a ham radio operator, Nick founded Ytel to give small and medium size businesses access to call center and communications software normally reserved for large corporations. Nick leads with transparency and putting customer service as the number one priority.






Matt Grofsky, CTO/CIOMatt_Grofsky_1.jpg

Matt provides Ytel with avenues to do things differently. As a software developer with close to 20 years experience, Matt is aggressive on deliverables and is able to get projects done. Matt is a successful inventor and has founded companies with Nick for the past 15 years.

 

1. In a few words that would make sense to even my Dad or a newbie to open source development, what does your company do for its clientele?
Every day our company Ytel helps thousands of businesses, and each year we support billions of communications. Providing businesses with communications software, Contact Center Software, and large scale phone call and text message campaigns. We are a registered telephone carrier which means we are very competitive when it comes to pricing and we have more control over call quality. We work directly with other telephone carriers like AT&T and provide our Customers with nationally recognized support and quality service.

2. What's the latest news for your company?
Ytel is constantly growing. The latest news for our company is that we have almost doubled in size in about a year and are not slowing down soon. Our CEO, Nick Newsom, was recently highlighted in Forbes to discuss work-life balance and how it has helped our company nearly double in size. 

Product wise, we are working on the release of V3 of the message360 API. We are seeing a ton of traction from new companies using it to automate and enhance customer communications. We were recently awarded Leader in Call Center Software for X5 Cloud Contact Center by GetApp. Read the full story here!

3. What do you look forward to the most about Cluecon conferences?
We look forward to networking with attendees and continuing to advance our knowledge with FreeSwitch tech.

4. How is your company involved in the global open source community?
We use and support open-source software in our enterprise environment. The reason we are sponsoring at ClueCon is so that we can give back to Freeswitch for giving so much to us. [Nice! @DIDX, also a Cluecon sponsor, and probably every attendee, whether as a developer, exhibitor, sponsor, speaker or other type of participant, totally agrees.]

6. How can the IP communications industry participate in the opportunities of chatbots, Internet beacons, virtual assistants, AI, IoT, blockchain and/or crypto currency? So many IP communications companies have felt that voice would always be their business as usual service.

Chatbots, AI, and Virtual Assistants are slowly replacing human interactions as the first line of contact in a company's Marketing, Sales and Support pipeline. These technologies often enhance security, privacy, and safety for both consumer and the business. Communications between the user and the AI communications channel can be authenticated and encrypted if used in a webchat environment. In the case of a banking system, it can also be encrypted for storage by the user or those with authorization to view it from a secure system.

Internet beacons and IoT devices, however, require that use of the devices or technologies understand what information is being obtained about them and where it is going. Both Internet Beacons and IoT devices have the capability to transmit information about a network, the device's/Pixel's geographical location and even personal data. In the case of Medical technologies, for example, you would want to make sure that any identifiable information is encrypted in transit and stored encrypted.

Companies used to a voice only offering should look at these growing technologies as another avenue of communication. Customers are increasingly looking for easier and more private forms of communications. It's not uncommon for someone to be too busy to make a phone call at work and rely on SMS or chat for communication. From an IoT perspective, it is becoming more common to see task specific devices grow in popularity. What used to require a software management on a dedicated computer for thousands of dollars can now be accomplished on a self-contained IoT device for a fraction of the cost. Just make sure the default password is changed if it has that option.

7. What are the best social networks, websites, and ytel-logo-matt-grofsky.pngforums where people can learn from you, collaborate with you and do business with you?

Twitter: @Ask_Nick
Twitter: @AskYtel
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asknick/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ytel
Twitter: @Code_Munkee
Keybase: https://keybase.io/code_munkee



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