Zingaya Blog

Firefox nightly build with WebRTC support on the screenshot. It’s exciting to see the progress!

WE’VE JUST RECEIVED NOTICE THAT YOU CAN TRY ZINGAYA IN YOUR RELEASE VERSION OF CHROME (at least in 18.0.1025.142)

As we mentioned in our previous post, Google is working on a Google Chrome dev build to let developers play with an early implementation of WebRTC technology. We’ve prepared a demo to let you try WebRTC right now – check it out using this URL http://demos.zingaya.com/webrtc/

Here are some useful tips:

• You can get Chrome beta from https://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/
• To enable WebRTC you need to open chrome://flags in your Chrome beta and click “Enable” under the “Enable MediaStream” option.

Zingaya is always on the cutting edge, and we’re proud to be the first company in the world that has enabled calls from WebRTC to real phone numbers through our cloud platform. There’s still a lot of work to be done for the WebRTC community, but we think we’re making good progress!

P.S. You can get the latest info about WebRTC at http://www.webrtc.org/

It may still be a little too close to winter to put on our swimming trunks, but that hasn’t stopped us from some exciting news: SwimOutlet.com has become Zingaya’s first North American retail customer. SwimOutlet, a “Hot 100 E-Retailer of 2012″ and “Top 10 Mobile Commerce E-Retailer” according to Internet Retailer (and they would know), has implemented the Zingaya widget into their customer service strategy.

“This is part of our ongoing commitment to enhance the customer service experience,” said SwimOutlet’s Director of Customer Service Anthony Ramirez. “We are always looking for ways to be ahead of the curve in terms of the technologies and features that we offer on SwimOutlet.com”

For an e-commerce website with high traffic, SwimOutlet will benefit from giving customers (and potential customers) the quickest way of reaching a live person to have their questions answered or their order completed. SwimOutlet has always been ahead of the curve in customer service technology, and we are proud to part of their story.

We’re excited to unveil Zingaya Enterprise, a freshly updated platform and API that enables VoIP calls from a browser or a mobile app with a single click. This announcement aims to help:

-Developers, who can build out mobile VoIP apps using the API.

-Support desks, who can accelerate resolutions.

-E-Commerce companies, who can improve conversion rates and increase order values.

Take a look at the full press release for more details, including social CRM enhancements like enterprise-grade call analytics reporting, complete customization of the widget’s look and feel, and even more call clarity and encryption upgrades.

Have questions abut how Zingaya can help your business? Give us a call (through your web browser, of course), by clicking on the “Call Us” button on the Zingaya homepage.

The Internet Revolution’s greatest impact on the retail industry has been to deliver greater self-service power to shoppers. Where shoppers once depended almost solely upon in-store sales clerks and toll-free contact center agents for in-depth information and to execute purchases, the internet added a channel that was often-times more helpful and convenient for shoppers while simultaneously less expensive for retailers. Customer satisfaction rose, margins increased, prices dropped and selection increased.

What followed the initial euphoria was an effort to train the late adopters. Banking provides an excellent example. Prior to the Internet Revolution, banks had already gone through such a process when the automatic teller machine (ATM) arrived. Transaction costs shrank and customers were serviced more quickly and with fewer errors. But most banking customers continued to wait in line for a human teller, even for simple withdrawals and deposits. Banks instructed tellers how to train their customers to conduct basic transactions using the newly-introduced ATM card. Most banks provided tellers financial incentives for getting customers to use the new technology. Once the ATM matured into a normal part of banking, the Internet Revolution introduced online banking and online bill-paying. Transaction costs shrank further and customers could be serviced faster and from the convenience of the home. But yet again, banks had to execute a strategy to migrate their customers to this more convenient and efficient medium.
Read more…

How can companies better integrate their customer service with their social and marketing approach? That’s one of the questions Forrester analyst Diane Clarkson recently discussed in a blog entry titled “Deepening the Relationship Between Marketing and Service is Critical for Social Success.”

Because of the general increased availability of brands and the onset of social media, customers expect more immediacy in getting attention, having their questions answered, and getting problems solved. Speed and efficiency aren’t just nice to have – they’re expected. The issue is: can customer support not only keep up with social media, but also help drive social initiatives? We certainly hope so. Our click-to-call widget, available on any web-based property, is designed to transition a potential customer from the informational stage to putting them on the phone with someone. (And doing so in one click of a mouse.) After all, how can you deepen the relationship between marketing and customer service more than creating instant one-on-one communication? Especially as web browsing increasingly transitions to mobile and portable devices, it’s important to let customers connect to support whether they’re at their desk, on the couch, or on the patio.

Better integration between social and customer service has probably always been a goal of companies – but it will be interesting to see how the gap is bridged between what Ms. Clarkson describes as “objective and performance.” The tools exist to help fuse the two, companies just need to strategize on how to best integrate them.

We’re techie guys here at Zingaya, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the aesthetics of a well-crafted landing page.  (And all the more relevant if that landing page is an e-commerce one.) That’s why this article in Website Magazine caught our discerning eye: it boils down 2011 to the best five e-commerce landing pages. Some might call this the Oscars for Landing Pages, but with arguably less fanfare.

We mostly agree with Website Magazine’s selections, but we also firmly believe every great e-commerce website has to have: 1) fantastic visual appeal, 2) an uncluttered design, and 3) seamlessly integrated ways to contact customer service. Breaking these five pages out, we extol The North Face for the attractive imagery used (as shown below), we laude Old Navy for getting a lot of information to the visitor without cluttering the page, and we commend Lush for incorporating a way to contact their service desk (even though adding a Zingaya widget would be a nice complement to their 1-800 number…).

Fantastic visual appeal from The North Face.

But whether you’re in the e-commerce business or a regular e-commerce shopper, take a look at these varied examples compiled by Website Magazine. Which is your favorite? Have any other examples of great e-commerce landing pages?

This screen was posted in http://www.webrtc.org/blog , looks like it’s already much better than Adobe Flash Privacy dialog, but WebRTC team promised to work more to make it better. From our point of view it misses [x]Remember option, to let people remember privacy settings for domains they trust.

Great to see the progress! Let’s hope this year will be the year of WebRTC

If the underlying assumptions behind certain business decisions are no longer true, intelligent companies revisit those decisions. For more than a decade, companies could safely assume that nearly all web-browsing was taking place on the desktop or the tabletop. The screen and the keyboard were large and hands were generally free to perform functions like holding and dialing a telephone without impeding simultaneous web-browsing. The emergence of more mobile and portable devices is changing all that. Web-browsing, especially consumer web-browsing, is migrating away from the desktop and the tabletop to places like the couch and the patio. Companies that depend upon their website to drive significant revenues need to assess the impact this migration has on their business and develop new strategies that address the changing medium and venue of web-browsing.

Fortunately, most aspects of web-browsing remain the same. Consumers still visit websites and browse from page to page conducting research and performing self-service. But there are three key differences to consider.
Read more…

Today WebRTC became available in the Chrome dev channel, it means that release version of the Chrome browser with WebRTC support will become available soon. Zingaya will use new exciting capabilities of WebRTC to provide our customers and users with the best possible experience. Thanks to Google, Ericsson, Voxeo, Cisco and Mozilla for their work, web-based audio and video calling within the browser will bring new exciting opportunities for all of us!