Exotel launches Heartbeat API: a step towards creating the ‘Internet of Telephony’

Exotel has announced the launch of Heartbeat API, their latest offering to monitor the health of their virtual numbers (Exophones) in real time. Customer traffic is usually at it’s all time high during the festive season. This makes being available all the more important from a businesses’ point of view. Keeping up with Exotel’s commitment towards reliability, Heartbeat API (Application Programming Interface) will create alarms and trigger notifications in case of a downtime to reduce the customer impact.

The Heartbeat API will serve as a transparent and reliable platform for customers in three ways; Measure the uptime, take Action by automating notifications in case of a downtime and Analyzingthe availability of their lines over time.

“Currently, this game changing product will benefit Exotel’s customers by enabling them to create fallbacks, or workarounds in case of an operator downtime. The end customer experience will become even more seamless because of this. Our aim is to make the heartbeat API available for everyone and not just our customers. And when that happens, it will inspire a variety of applications. This is the first step towards what we refer to as the ‘Internet of Telephony’,” said Shivakumar Ganesan, CEO & Founder, Exotel.

The Internet of Telephony is the idea where all of the telephony infrastructure is connected to the internet and is able to identify themselves to other devices. If the entire telephony network is virtualized, the Heartbeat API can be used to potentially predict the health of any phone number.

Heartbeat API and AI

The Heartbeat API can be used in multiple ways by our customers. One of them will be to enable AI powered operations at their end. It will potentially be a source of training data. For example, an ad engine can make decisions to optimize ad campaigns, by only enabling click to call operations on ads when a virtual number is up.

The magic of always being available - the business impact

Providing great customer experience is the only way to ensure a business survival in a competitive market. Businesses face huge losses because of bad user experience caused due to unavailability of communication lines. In a lot of cases, issue is due to operator downtimes, a business may not even realise it until the end-customer gets affected.  A monitoring system like Heartbeat API can help quick identification of the issue and avoid latency in solving it.

The verticals most affected by downtimes are cab aggregators, market places and last mile delivery. Customer calls is the foundation of business communication and is an essential business operation. One of the most relevant implementations of the Heartbeat API is the fact that businesses can switch to another healthy virtual number. This ensures that the business disruption is minimum to none.