Author Archives: Ari Rabban

We Care About Our Customers

by Ari Rabban

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Does a phone service provider really care about its customers? You bet. We at Phone.com truly care. From our first day of operations almost five years ago we have been listening and communicating with our customers. We have designed features and applications based on customer feedback. We have worked with customers to offer them a unique app that might not be available online and we do our best to explain our development process.

Our developers and our customer support managers constantly communicate with one another and address customer questions. It may seem like its just a phone service but yet there is so much to learn from how and where our customers use our services.

Over the years we have received many unsolicited thank you emails and we publish some of them on our website and some you can see on our Facebook Fan Page.

Recently, after Superstorm Sandy we wrote an email to all our customers (I posted it below).

Dear Phone.com Family, 

If you or your loved ones are affected by Hurricane Sandy we want to convey our thoughts and prayers for your safety, recovery, and restoration.

If there is anything we can do to facilitate your communication at this difficult time please call us at 800-998-7087 or reply to this email.  You can also reach us via Twitter and Facebook.

Sincerely,
Ari Rabban
CEO
And the entire Phone.com team

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We also offered help and support to small businesses who were affected by the storm.  So today I just wanted to share some emails we got from customers responding to the email we sent out:

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Dear Ari &

Phone.com Team,

I just wanted to thank you for this letter.  Receiving this simple gesture from you is a positive demonstration of leveraging your business influence to reach out to the many communities that you serve.

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 Okay…. THIS is a nice, human, thoughtful, compassionate message and offer. Thank you for drawing on the real and not the corporate “person” at this times.

Sincerely, my best,

Jennifer

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Thank you for this kind, generous and caring email! It is not often when a tragedy strikes that companies take the time to actually DO something for their customers. Thank you for putting your customers first! In Gratitude, Stacy

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Dear Mr. Rabban,

RE: Hurricane Sandy Email

You & your team are a class act. Time and again your company efforts, impress. I was a longtime Vonage customer and now thank the day I switched to Phone.com. Regards, Tom

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  In a time when customer service is hard to come by and the all-mighty dollar reigns as a priority, it is so reassuring to receive this email from Mr. Rabban.  

 I don’t have any relatives on the East Coast …. just fellow Americans.  I wish to thank you for this email and I am very happy to have selected you to handle my phone needs.

 Gary

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Very thoughtful, thank you! Tom

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We like to see these type of emails. I know all our employees thrive based on such feedback. Our “first response” team, our customer service managers are the first to alert us when they get feedback (good or bad) from customers and to raise topics for discussions  internally.

To all our customers and employees – keep it coming, Continue to communicate. After all our tagline is Communicate Better!

Phone.com Ranked #23 on the 50 Fastest Growing Companies in New Jersey

by Ari Rabban

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Last night Alon and I attended the  NJBIZ awards dinner honoring the 50 Fastest Growing Businesses in New Jersey. The award dinner and ceremony took place at the beautiful Palace in Somerset New Jersey.

We were honored to find out we were ranked #23 on this prestigious list which included both private as well as publicly traded companies.

 NJBIZ is a great publication for any business owner big or small in NJ and provides information and resources for all industries.  As a company serving small businesses and with well over 1000 small business customers in NJ we are very proud to share in the success of NJ and especially at such hard economic times and after the devastation of superstorm Sandy. We are also happy to do our small share helping storm small business victims.

This recognition follow our #262 rank in the national INC500 list for fastest growing private companies in America.

We owe our success to all our employees and to our customers. Yes that is perhaps what everyone says but we have an amazing team of first and foremost extremely talented and caring customer service and support managers led by a great management team that will think of anyway to help our customers. That is our company motto. I don’t want to sound like I am just saying this “for protocol”. Read the unsolicited feedback we constantly receive from our customers in email responses, social media and on phone calls and also read about how our customer service is inspired.

We also have a great (and growing)engineering and development team as well as product and marketing experts and we are extremely lucky to have such a group of knowledgeable professionals.Hearing the passionate debates and discussions in meetings and reading the late night and weekend emails about one customer problem or question, or about a new feature, are clearly prove to us that we are on the right path and that our employees are excited and proud.

And although we are a NJ company we  have a large presence in San Diego. We are truly a coast to coast company and so is any award we get.

We need to thank all our employees and our customers and look forward to an even more exciting 2013 (well – we still have more to come in 2012 first).

International Long Distance and VoIP

by Ari Rabban

I just read a post by Gary Kim siting Skype CEO and stating that Skype accounts for 33% of all International Long Distance phone call traffic. !45 billion minutes out of 438 billion in 2011. Skype of course is a VoIP (voice over IP or internet telephony) provider.

I have been following the VoIP market pretty much from its inception, I remember back in the 90s when we briefed the industry analyst who specialized in VoIP traffic monitoring (like Probe Research, Telegeography and the big guns like IDC and Gartner and later on Instat and others).

Some of them monitored traffic based on equipment sold because there just a handful of providers. Anyway – what i really remember is that we were happy as an industry to see that international long distance (we called it ILD) using VoIP network went up from 4% to 6% of all ILD traffic. When it reached 10% we were trying to get everyone’s attention to let them know VoIP is for real.

Well: VoIP is not only for real. It is pretty much the only game in town in just 15 years.

If FaceTime were video with no voice would AT&T block it?

by Ari Rabban

The FCC’s Net Neutrality rules prevent MSOs (cable TV companies) and phone companies from banning competing services on their networks.

Apples recent decision to open up its FaceTime video chat app to 3G means that FaceTime will soon be able to be used on iPhones over the AT&T (or Verizon or Sprint) phone network without the need to be connected to wifi.

AT&T announced and defends a quick decision they made to allow their iPhone customers to use Facetime over their network but only if they purchase or shift to the AT&T shared data plans.

Well – that will mean many who are not on those plans or don’t wish to change plans will not be able to use FaceTime over cellular and still enjoy it only when connected to wifi and by that have limited use of their iPhone capabilities because they are blocked by AT&T.

Perhaps AT&T can take whatever marketing or pricing decision they want and perhaps it has something to do with fear of network congestion as well but the main issue here is whether AT&Ts decision is a violation of the Net Neutrality rules?  Is AT&T preventing a competing service from operating on its network?

AT&Ts claim: there is no violation as a) AT&T does not have its own video chat service and b) that AT&T does not block download of any video chat applications with some distinction between pre-loaded apps like FaceTime and downloadable apps.

I will let the pundits argue these facts but the one issue I would like to address is whether the fact that AT&T does not have video chat means they don’t compete with FaceTime (or other video chat apps)?  Video chat includes voice and voice (VoIP technology in all video chat cases) is AT&Ts business (OK – some will argue it is becoming data etc but lets stick with voice for now) and certainly we can see a competitive service.

If FaceTime would work with an AT&T voice call over its cellular network and the FaceTime app would only deliver the images without its own voice would AT&T block it or require certain plans?

I will leave it at that. Happy to hear other or more thoughts.

Live Coverage of the Olympics?

by Ari Rabban

A lot has been and still is been written about NBCs practice of tape delaying all the major events from the London Olympics, as they have also done in past Olympics. All one needs to do is follow #NBC on Twitter to read the comments coming from superstars like Dirk Nowitzki to venture capitalists and other popular blogs.

The bottom line is obvious: we can all complain as much as we want but it is about the “bottom line” and after NBC paid $1.2B or something like that for the rights to the Olympics they have to protect it with prime time viewing and prime dollars from advertisers. Doubt any executive could or would have done anything different.

However, the price NBC paid will probably hurt them in the long run. It is a flawed model and one that all the talented executives that negotiated these mega contracts with the IOC simply did not know how to do in a different way.

I read comments that state that only 8% of Americans are on Twitter so they don’t really know the results until they watch the 8pm East Coast show and also read that many will just prefer not to read the results online and wait for the tape delay.

Perhaps, but in the internet era it is just so wrong. I truly wonder how many viewers do not know the result of the 4*100 swim relay that took place several hours ago and that NBC will show in about one or two hours from now…

One thing I am certain of: in the long run this contract will hurt NBC. I can’t see this happening in Rio2016 (the next summer games) or even in Sochi2014 (the next winter games).

TVs will all have internet build in them. Everyone will know the result and the ability to “delete” all videos of the events will not work nor will the ability to prevent live viewing from other sources. I watched the entire opening ceremony Friday afternoon after a two minute search online (I hope the site I used wont give my laptop a virus but it seemed quite legit and the broadcast was a great quality broadcast from BBC One).

In the bigger picture what is happening is not so different from what the VoIP industry did to traditional telecom in just less than 15 years. In 1997 through 1999 no one at AT&T, MCI or Bell Atlantic expected VoIP would do what it did to this mighty industry. In 2000 Lucent Technologies, Nortel and Alcatel still sold billions of dollars worth of switches (and the above mentioned carriers paid nicely for them). I don’t need to write what happened to these companies. OK I am not saying the IOC will end up like Lucent (a company I was once a very proud employee of) and also not that NBC will end up like MCI but big changes are going to happen.

We already watch TV in a different way  than we used to with most shows set to record by our DVRs. We already skip ads and I think the ad revenues for NBC in two and four years must hurt. I am hardly an ad expert and did not do any major research to back this up but I assume the Comcast executives that bought NBC are working on something different.

Most important, I can’t believe that in the United States in 2012 we are the only place in the modern world where we can’t see Olympic events live. Can’t see that continuing.