By Thomas Mahoney, Robotalker
Who we are:
Robotalker.com has been serving clients for close to 14 years and offers a user-friendly website that allows churches, schools, medical offices and healthcare providers to stay in contact and inform their customers about things like events, medical information, and appointments.
We offer clients both text messaging and automated phone calls for a variety of purposes keeping them 100% FCC and FTC legal in the process.
We use SignalWire for automated calls and texts with our autoresponder feature where customers can call a dedicated phone number, transparently provided by SignalWire, hear a message with common FAQ and then receive a text message with the companies listing for available rental properties, a link with directions, a link to their website for more information and so on. We also use SignalWire’s business to business toll-free numbers for our clients who send out large broadcasts for political campaigns or Black Friday sales and coupons.
Why the change:
We have worked with service providers for text messages as well as phone call SIP providers and we know when we have found a good vendor. SignalWire’s OUTSTANDING customer support has made our job of providing solutions to clients so much easier. With other providers, we’ve had to wait 48 hours to speak with agents who had difficulty communicating with us and took days to figure out our problem. Now we have the ability to pick up the phone and speak directly with our dedicated SignalWire agent to get answers immediately. Rather than having a relationship with another chat bot at Twilio, we had and still have great support with SignalWire, which is the most important reason we needed a change.
The ability to use SignalWire in addition to our short-code has provided an increased level of redundancy for all of our calls and their sound quality has been excellent.
Another big reason we needed a change was pricing. By switching from Twilio to SignalWire, we were able to reduce our cost SIGNIFICANTLY. The switch was PAINLESS and the DID’s cost 8 CENTS/ month compared to Twillio’s 1 DOLLAR / month. Multiply that by 1000 phone lines and the savings far outweigh the minor coding changes in the changeover from Twilio to SignalWire. All of our old Twilio code was 100% compatible with the SignalWire API and therefore we only made a separate initialization method based on the SID to switch between SignalWire and Twilio (SW has dashes in their SIDS while Twilio does not). We ported all our phone numbers over from Twilio and saw immediate savings as each number switched to 8 Cents / month thanks to SignalWire.
How we switched over:
It was so easy to switch to the SignalWire SDK. We had thousands of lines of code for our autoresponder and we didn’t need to change a single line of code. That’s AMAZING! https://robotalker.com/Inbound For our dialer code, we support legacy Twilio numbers (that could not be ported) in addition to all new SignalWire numbers. They can easily co-exist in the same application with a simple switch, it's that simple!
How quick it was:
Robotalker.com changed over from old to new within 5 days including all testing. All of our handlers did not need modification or changes for IVR, text messages replies, and autoresponders. PAINLESS INTEGRATION with SignalWire’s Technical support is only a phone call away. Our own customer support has become simpler and better for our clients as a result of SignalWire’s great support. If we had a phone number stop working with Twilio, we were stuck talking to bot emails while problems took 2-3 days to be resolved. Now we make a phone call and we have a solution thanks to SignalWire’s live, local support. Better service and MUCH LOWER VARIABLE AND FIXED COSTS means we can provide lower prices to our customers.