According to http://www.internetlivestats.com there are over 1,900,835,866 websites world wide, most probably each and every one of them has a web form or <form></form> tags into them.
The developers that take jobs of building apps and websites often stop making any profit from the clients when the job is done, and as you know when SMTP server credentials change by client the form stops working and the whole website become not useful for small businesses when that happens.
In this blog post i want to share how a developer can keep interest in serving the client and make sure that their forms work reliability, make recurring income from them and WoW the client with the service provided.
CPaaS stands for Communications Platform as a Service. A CPaaS is a platform that enables web or mobile developers to add real-time communications features (Voice, Video, and SMS, Phone numbers) in their own applications without needing to build backend infrastructure and interfaces.
Basically we will focus how with a simple API request you can send a SMS text or initiate a phone call to any phone number in the world.
You will need an account id and token with your request to be able to send successful messages/calls.
Using CPaaS with <form></form> tags
Let’s start by a simple example, when the client fills a a contact form, we want to immediately call them by connecting to our call center number first then once we pickup call the customer phone number supplied in the form.
This open GitHub repo demonstrates a simple contact form that will initiate a call to First Number (Call Center Number) and Second Number (Customer Number).
Another simple curl example for sending out an SMS message is below:
curl -X POST https://<accountSid>:<authToken>@cloud.restcomm.com/restcomm/2012-04-24/Accounts/<accountSid>/SMS/Messages -d "To=$customer" -d "From=$company" -d "Body=This is a test from $company_name"
PHP Example on GitHub
CPaaS has also Emails API which means with a similar curl request you can also handle emails sending, for example:
curl -X POST https://<accountSid>:<authToken>@cloud.restcomm.com/restcomm/2012-04-24/Accounts/ACae6e420f425248d6a26948c17a9e2acf/Email/Messages -d "To=email@hotmail.com" -d "From=email@gmail.com" -d "Body=This is a test from RestComm" -d "Subject=Test Email"
So by now you have added Email/Voice/SMS functionality into your web forms, now your clients have to top-up some funds with you on recurring basis to make sure that the functionality of SMS and Voice will work out of the box.
Making Money
Almost every developer almost out there can build HTML forms and provide email alert functionality, but no so many can create a complete business automation that can WOW both the lead and the business your building for, the conversion rates that will show up for the businesses that choose to deploy this functionality will keep them coming back, guaranteed !
Your money as a developer will be on the usage, for example you would ask your customer to top-up lets say $100.00, which will give them X amount of SMS and Voice usage capability.
When the funds are reaching a low state you can email them to top-up again to keep the functionality working for SMS/Voice.
Here you have it, how to lock in your customer by giving them more value and keep them paying you on recurring basis after you have build their websites. this also gives you another advantage for being hired for the next project the this company might have.
I hope you find this blog useful, if you have any questions please let me know, if you’d like a free API Key, Token to test with do not hesitate to reach out to us.
