Vonage emphasizes on its website that it has three primary focuses as far as the services it provides. These are unified communication systems, which is its primary business communication system, a full contact center feature set, as well as Vonage’s outstanding communications application programming interface (API) environment where highly customizable solutions can be developed and deployed. This is a very complete set of options for small businesses as well as enterprises with over 1,000 employees.
Other than the most popular telephony features, Vonage delivers:
- Collaboration and productivity tools including call announce (so you know as much as possible about who is calling), call and paging groups, call monitoring, and team messaging.
- Vonage meetings, an intuitive video collaboration solution that is made available across your organization.
- An easy-to-use and intuitive user portal that allows individual phone users to configure and manage their extensions themselves.
- Virtual receptionist enables you to customize your call routing for exceptional customer service.
- Vonage meetings, an On Net Conference Suite, is a virtual destination where up to 15 people can call in for a group conversation.
- A full call center suite with robust phone menu IVRs and advanced call handling algorithms ideal for small businesses and also highly scalable to accommodate larger enterprises.
Communication APIs
On its website, a service that is very prominently displayed is the Communications APIs service, and this prominence reflects the importance that Vonage places on this offering. The service was introduced when Vonage acquired both Nexmo and TokBox, two complementary API development platforms that focused on communications APIs and video APIs respectively. According to Vonage, the developers’ community is alive and vibrant with over 940,000 registered developers. The result is a platform on which customized communication and video APIs can be designed, developed, and deployed to function with your communication system.
An application programming interface is a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate. It is essentially a piece of software that translates the language one application speaks to that of another. In this context, this service enables Vonage unified communications and call center services to achieve deep integration with third-party business software applications including helpdesk, CRM, and collaboration platforms, delivering information from these platforms to agents and users of the service.