Launch of the Ring.io iOS app: dedicated to the free spirited sales pros

I’m writing this from a coworking space in Grenoble, France (come visit, amazing mountains). I’ve got my laptop, my iPhone and my AirPods, and that’s my office.

I remember writing over a decade ago in the whitepaper that gave birth to Ring.io that “Your computer is your phone”. That notion seemed radical to me, because back then when we worked in offices, all together, most of us had desktop PCs and a wired office phone next to it. Computers were slow and unreliable, and the tech that allowed us to build voice apps was in its infancy. We saw the office phone as an anachronism, and it turned out to be.

Right around that time, Apple made the opposite (much bigger) bet: that “Your phone is your computer”. The first breakthrough that they brought to the table was combining a touch interface with a visual web browser running on a 3G network. The second, more revolutionary, was to open this device to third-party developers.

What few would have guessed back then is that neither device – phone or computer – would replace the other. Today, information professionals do their work both on a computer and on their phones. Each complements each other. The laptop is a big information screen, and where we type. The phone is for messaging, audio, and sometimes video. That’s the reigning setup for sales pros.

We waited for a long time to launch an iPhone app for Ring.io. Mostly because we wanted to build something really good that could work as a primary interface for phone-centric users. We felt the technology to do that wasn’t there. And the abysmal ratings of our competitor’s iPhone apps were there to prove that users hated their efforts to build a mobile app for “Work Calls”.

The wait is over. Today, if you have a Ring.io account (free trial here), you can start dialing from your iPhone, through your Ring.io Number to contacts in your mobile app CRM, your email, or your phone address book.

• Calls go out through your data plan using crystal-clear audio codecs.
• Your Caller ID is that of your professional Ring.io Number, not your cell phone’s
• Your calls get automatically logged in your CRM
• You can disposition and annotate your calls
• If you have call recording turned on, your calls will be recorded
• If your team uses Live Monitor, your calls can be live monitored (to show the rookies how it’s done)

Work calls are fundamentally different from personal calls. When we make a work call we are representing a company, and there are standards to uphold. Someone else at the company wants to know what happened during the call. Even ourselves, as users, we want to know what happened during that call much later on, when we need to reference that conversation.

That’s the tech that Ring.io built, a system for making and organizing outreach efforts to customers and prospects. And our iPhone app follows the same philosophy that we pioneered with the Ring.io Web Phone: 1) Keep everything centered on your CRM, 2) Stay out of the way, 3) Automate the collection of information for the rep and 4) Make the generation of insights for their managers a natural extension of using the system.

Above all, we realize that our users spend several hours a day using Ring.io, and we wanted to make a mobile app that people would love using. And that’s what we hope we built.

We would love your feedback. If you love the app, leave us a review. And if you find faults with it give us a chance to hear privately how you’d like it to work, and we will make it so.

At Ring.io we love working from anywhere, and this app is our contribution to every free spirited sales pro who feels the same need to explore, and work, at the same time, from wherever they please.

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