Can you use Twillio as a smart routing business phone solution?

Hi. I'm a Business Intelligence consultant with most of my customers being call centers. There are definitely guidelines you can apply but it will be based on several factors. Your question references ratios, which I assume means you would like to know how many agents per customer. That number will vary greatly depending on a number of other factors including: -what is your ASA target (Average speed of answer)? -what percentage of calls should meet the ASA? -are their penalties below a certain threshold (if less than 80% of calls meet ASA in 24 hours, for example) -how long are calls waiting when they don't meet ASA? -what is the call distribution by day of week, time of day and holiday v. non-holiday. -what is the average call duration? -what is the % of calls requiring escalation or call back versus calls resolved on first contact? To simplify it though, the two most important (IMO) will be call volume and your target for ASA (assuming you aren't answering then putting them back on hold, etc). To simplify though, the top 3 are: ASA, Call length and call volume. Regardless of the size of customer base. A good reporting system that combines live metrics and daily/weekly/monthly analysis will help a great deal. Feel free to set up a call if you'd like to talk about this in more detail.

I've helped lots of SaaS companies improve their onboarding processes over the years, but I just published my best (high-level) piece on doing this right: http://sixteenventures.com/customer-onboarding The bottom line is (though I suggest reading the entire article) you need to know what success looks like for your customer - what their Desired Outcome is - and then reverse engineer the steps necessary to get there. Going through that process will reveal the steps necessary to get them to that Desired Outcome outside of the product; we're not talking about functional steps within the product yet. Map this out using flow charts, line lists, mind map, white board, etc. The tool isn't important as much as doing this right. Now, once you understand the process required to move them from Step 0 - deciding to take action to reach their desired outcome to Step z - achieving their (at least initial) Desired Outcome, you can start laying out, designing, and building the in-product processes necessary to achieve those success milestones and ultimately, their Desired Outcome. You should then peg your email (or other lifecycle messaging) flow to those success milestones (rather than doing a timed follow-up), where each message is sent like this: "have they done this milestone? yes, then send this message to get them to the next one." Since each user and customer will achieve success on their own cadence, it's best to not have a timed autoresponder sequence but to actually trigger based on milestones reached. The good news is that this is relatively easy to do given the availability of lifecycle messaging services. See this post for more on this topic: http://sixteenventures.com/email-follow-up-sequence Hopefully this helps, but if you want more details or - more importantly - want to figure out how to apply this thinking directly to your situation, request at least a 15-minute call with me.

Hi, I have been a PHP developer for 13 years and have experience building enterprise applications. What framework are you using? Most PHP frameworks have a built in authentication and authorization mechanism. For example, Yii has a builtin RBAC system that allow you to define a hierarchical permission system. If you're not using a framework or you just want to implement your own system for whatever reason then you can utilize Object Oriented Design and implement a Base controller (if MVC) that checks the permission for each request. That won't use a lot of if statements. Probably need more info, to give definitive guidance. Hope that helps.

NOT Wordpress! Facebook uses PHP among other languages, if that tells you anything. Every programmer will be bias toward what they like and what they are used to coding with. The bigger question for you is, have you completed your due diligence? Is there a real need for another crowd funding platform? Why would yours be so different that it would stand out among the others? Who is you target market? What is your unique selling proposition? How big is your potential market? Should you go vertical or horizontal? You may have already answered these and the two dozen other questions every entrepreneur must ask before they waste valuable time and money to become another business start up statistic. Assuming you have a strong grasp of where you are heading and a solid strategic blueprint to be able to predict your growth, the last thing I will leave you with is this. The programing language is not nearly as important as your database structure and IT infrastructure for the purpose of scale. Not to say the language is not important - all three components work together. Spend time on the other two and work backwards. If you would like to discuss this further at no charge, use the link below. I provide a free 30 minute consultation to first time callers. https://clarity.fm/kevinmccarthy/FreeConsult Best regards, Kevin McCarthy www.kevinmccarthy.com

Hi! I would be careful in compensating only by commission. This will give you the kind of sales reps you might not want. If you were to invest your time, would you not want to receive some kind of fixed fee for the invested time? Also, by paying commission based, you are telling the sales guy that you don't know if the product will sell, but that you don't want to be the one risking the time invested. I'd go for a mix.