Micro-blogging site Twitter has been hogging IP-related headlines for the past several weeks, whether it’s playing a large role in organizing rallies in Iran during hotly contested and divisive elections, or upsetting a major league baseball manager.

 

It’s easy to forget that the technology behind Twitter was created for the same reason that so many other IP communications technologies were, including “interactive voice response,” or IVR: to make communicating easier and more cost-effective.

 

Today, we hear from one provider of unified communications and self-service applications including IVR, VoIP and outbound notification solutions, there’s a new way that companies looking to increase multi-channel capabilities as part of their customer support strategies can offer support using Twitter.

 

Officials at Voxeo Corporation announced today that their recently acquired IMified platform now supports inbound and outbound communication via Twitter.

 

Thanks to an application offered on the IMified platform, the more customers communicate with a company via Twitter, the more the app starts to recognize common questions and responses and can then scan incoming Tweets to reply back appropriately based on the message.

This improves response times for customers – further stretching their loyalty and experiences and gives agents more time to focus on other detailed inquires.

 

“Twitter has brought a direct, human element back into customer service and support,” said Dan York, director of conversations at Voxeo (News - Alert). “We use Twitter extensively to interact with our customers and developers and want to help companies grow their use of Twitter for customer interaction.”    

 

IMified is a hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform that sends automated IMs on behalf of companies. Voxeo acquired the company last month in a move to boost its unified communications and unified self-service efforts. This includes their vision to allow UC apps to work across all voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM, mobile Web and social messaging sites.

 

Using Twitter and the IMified platform, companies are also able to create an application that will respond to customer inquires even at late hours when staff members are not working as well as make use of the message scanning capabilities to heighten important communications from customers that may need immediate or special attention.

In addition to providing a new contact channel for customers, the new offering also takes away the need for customers to move through phone-based IVR menus to provide their information, instead they with an automated agent for a more human-like interaction.

 

Beyond just customer interactions with customer service agents, the IMified platform can also be used to send outbound notification messages via Twitter on behalf of the company. These messages can be used to alert customers when a product becomes available, a special promotion is happening, or other relevant information.

Developers are also being encouraged to sign up for the IMified platform and create apps that interact with Twitter.