Most people likely associate “push to talk” with the little chirp that is heard when a cell phone communicates with another on the same carrier using the short-range radio feature. But push to talk has new meaning for users of the online classifieds at The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post. Using technology from Reston, Va.-based eStara Inc., The Post (daily, 154,000; Sunday, 190,931) added a button that lets potential buyers connect to sellers in a very immediate way, according to Dan Shorter, PalmBeachPost.com’s general manager.

Although the concept is simple, only the advent of voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony, combined with relatively sophisticated Internet connectivity, makes it possible.

When a Web site visitor pushes the onscreen Talk to Seller icon, that call request is passed to an eStara data center. The center instantly places phone calls to both the customer and the seller or store, and connects them together using VoIP.

Every classified ad placed online at PalmBeachPost.com, both liner and display, now features a ‘Talk to Seller’ icon. The technology from eStara connects buyers and sellers instantly through hosted VoIP telephony.
Graphic: The Palm Beach Post
 

The software also supports cross-channel data passing, which means that contextual information from the caller’s Web session can be passed to call-center agent software, and display automatically with a call. This can include personal user data, shopping cart contents, Web site pages viewed, or current page URL.

Rather than trying to selectively sell the feature with discrete classifieds packages, The Post opted to automatically include the functionality with every liner and display ad that is placed online, Shorter said.

“By enhancing our classifieds technology, we’re reminding [the advertisers] that their leads are being generated by The Palm Beach Post, and that helps us stand above other classified listings,” he said.

The Post and eStara engineered the service to remind users of the benefits of using the paper to place their classified ads, Shorter said.

When a seller picks up the phone to respond to an eStara-sourced call, the first message heard is: “Please hold for another lead from The Palm Beach Post,” Shorter said.

This feature lets advertisers place a direct value on customer response in a way (outside of coupons) that is difficult to measure via traditional print, he said.

The implementation

Clicking on a Talk to Seller icon brings up a much smaller, subsidiary screen where the buyer types in his  phone number. That window is called from an extremely lengthy URL with a considerable number of variables included. The necessary integration between the app and The Post’s display and liner classified software was a formidable challenge that consumed considerable development time, Shorter said.

Just as many Web-enabled newspaper apps will automatically make an e-mail address live by detecting the “@” symbol or hyperlink a URL by picking up the “www” sequence of letters, the eStara software can do the same thing with phone numbers. However, that required a precise standardization of the way phone numbers are entered across all classified ads.

“Everything is automated now,” Shorter said. “But to get it all said and done, we had to work with around eight different vendors, because we use that many different sources for things like shopping, jobs, autos, real estate, classifieds, all of our different verticals. It was a big task. It’s in English and Spanish, and we did it for all four of our papers at once.” (Editor’s note: The Palm Beach Post’s other products are Florida Pennysaver, Palm Beach Daily News, and La Palma.)

With thousands of advertisers across all categories, the introduction of the program caught some of them by surprise, Shorter said.

“But it was a very pleasant type of surprise, based on the feedback we’ve gotten so far,” he said.

Shorter declined to discuss pricing specifics for the eStara service, but confirmed that it was based on a flat rate and not tied to call volume. This is the first time eStara had agreed to explore such an alternate pricing strategy, he said, since call volumes were impossible to estimate in advance for this new market for the service.