Ringio, one of many new players in the cloud voice market, enhanced its service by connecting it to PBX systems and improving its call routing features. The company is trying to differentiate itself in this highly competitive field by focusing on Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functions.The vendor's Rich Calling service presents calls and their contextual details to users working with desktop clients (PC, Macintosh or Linux) or mobile devices, such as Android smart phones. The service synchs up with Google contact lists. Employees can set their phones to Do Not Disturb when they need to get some work done.

The start up vendor announced its service in April and tweaked it during the beta testing cycle, which involved 300 companies. One improvement is the service works with PBXs so calls can be routed via five digit dialing as well as nine digit dialing. In addition, employees' home and mobile phones can be integrated into the system.

Companies can record, install and change custom greetings. Ringio can be configured to greet callers by name and automatically route them to the person they spoke with last. In addition, calls can also be routed to predefined lists of employees, say those with a particular skill set or working in a specific department. Pricing for the service is $99 per month for four users, with additional users at costing $25 per month.

Ringio is venturing into a hot market. Because sophisticated voice functions have become easier to deploy and so many small and medium businesses understand that communications can improve productivity, customer interest has been growing. However, a wide (and ever growing) list of companies has ventured into this space. Time will tell if Ringio's emphasis on IVR and CRM functions will enable it to pull away from the pack.