This tweet on the 24^th of March, by the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, clearly highlights the fact that he knows how to reach out to the people of India.

This innovative idea to reach out to the urban as well as the rural population of India who resides in distant corners of India proved to very helpful in connecting the PM to his people. A simple missed call to connect with PM would suffice for the people who live in remote places of India where constant connectivity is still an issue. Moreover, people appreciated this effort made by the government.

Continuing his desire to connect with people, Shri Narendra Modi decided to connect with his countrymen through the national broadcasting medium ‘All India Radio’ and thus began ‘Mann Ki Baat’. This was an important step in his efforts to let people know that the new government is a ‘people’s government’ and that the nation would run under more transparency.

Use of Missed Call Marketing to Connect with People

Now even during his election campaign, Narendra Modi made sure to utilize the latest technologies to connect to both the older and younger generation to get his word out faster. Mobile screen units, 3D projectors were used to spread his word far and wide. The effect was massive, and the result was reflected in the mandate he received.

The tweet above clearly highlights the fact that Narendra Modi wanted to connect to even those who did not have access to smartphones, internet connectivity or any media platform. But the miss call marketing feature for his tweets allowed anybody across India even with just feature phones to receive his tweets, simply by dialing 011 3006 3006.

‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio program which was broadcasted over the ‘All India Radio’, a radio network of Prasar Bharati has a reach of 98% of India geographically and 90% demographically. Thus, it proves to be a wise decision of Modi to opt for a channel which was the widest reach among others.

But even this communication method has few limits. Not everyone could tune in to the radio at the right time; some missed the broadcast due to other commitments and some due to network issues. So, in the year of 2016, the government knew that other implementations had to be done to go beyond radio to make ‘Mann Ki Baat’ more accessible to the people

The most common medium was the cellular phone, and this was deemed as the best tool to reach out to a wider section of the people. It was not an easy task though, as India has the world’s second largest population and to target every phone user would be a herculean task of sorts.

To tackle this problem, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) consulted mGage India for help. mGage India had already helped the NIC and the government of India before. The Ministry of Agriculture had launched their farmer outreach program. The farmers would receive updates on the weather, the latest fertilizers, pesticides, etc. through SMS. Under this service, it was surmised that around 600 million messages were being sent.

National SMS solution

mGage India thus started their journey by providing national SMS solutions which could reach out to a wide audience. But today, the voice solutions such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), outbound calling (ODB) and most importantly missed call marketing have become more popular.

Quite recently the company was tasked to survey the Indian population for the opinions on the performance of the new government under Narendra Modi. The survey was conducted across a wide demographic and bulk SMSs were sent out. Interested citizens could then give a missed call on the provided number to receive a survey call. Thus, missed call marketing already proved to be a great tool in reaching out to people in such a short duration of time.

Now during the search of a solution to increase the reach of ‘Man Ki Baat’ program, missed call marketing turned out to be of great use. So, for those who missed the live broadcast of the program, could now give a missed call to receive the recording of the broadcast.

Use of Voice-Based Technology

The missed call marketing service was set up using a voice-based technology is an association with telecom operators. Any citizen, who missed the live broadcast could leave a missed call on the number 1922 and request for a replay of the latest broadcast of Shri Narendra Modi from ‘Mann Ki Baat’. The national database would register that citizen’s number. After that, an automated call would be initiated to that number, and on answering the call, the entire episode would be replayed on the mobile phone. Whoever listens to it, can listen to it as long as they’d like and disconnect anytime in between if they wished to.

It is estimated that around 7 to 8 lakhs of the population catch the replay of the broadcast of ‘Mann Ki Baat’ through their phones. So, it is quite evident that missed call service has played a vital role to connect PM with his fellow citizens.

There are a lot of new methods and innovative ways that businesses are trying their hands on to improve customer service and build long-term relationships. One such method is missed call marketing. Before we get into the various advantages that missed called marketing has for a business, let us first understand what missed call marketing actually is and how can it be beneficial.

What is Missed Call Marketing?

Missed call marketing is a method which new businesses can use to promote their products and services. Businesses can simply release their telephone number among the customers and ask them to give missed call for any promotional or other purposes. The call is considered as a missed call because the call automatically gets disconnected after 2-3 rings after registering the customers’ interest or response.

Let us look at an example when the missed call marketing technique became popular, and companies started to adopt it.

A company started to offer their customers live cricket updates of their favourite team’s game. The customers could do this by just leaving a missed call on a given number, and they would receive continuous live updates. This proved to be very beneficial and greatly improved the customer relations of that company.

And the initial expenditure for the company did not prove to be high to market their new service. All it took them was to get the word out through social media platforms such as Facebook by way of advertisements and posts on their company profile. Within a few months, their customer base reached into the millions.

This example clearly indicates that adopting a missed call marketing technique can help the company in gaining popularity as well as in building a healthy customer relationship.

What Missed Call Marketing Mean for Customers?

For all the customers out there, missed call marketing can be a very laid back and easily accessible method to get in touch with a business. Customers today do not have much time due to their busy lifestyles and prefer to get in touch with companies through quick and convenient methods. This is beneficial for the customers who do not have access to the internet at all times and are short on balance most of the time.

Customers appreciate the miss call service when it comes to quick query resolution such as checking the bank balance, outstanding phone bill or casting vote.

What Missed Call Marketing Mean for Business?

Looking from the perspective of a business, it is a very cost-effective marketing tool. This is so because companies can be assured that people can reach out to them without any cost via a missed call. Companies also do not have to employ hundreds of customer service agents 24/7 to attend these customers as this kind of marketing does not require any conversation.

How is Missed Call Service Beneficial for Business?

In a nutshell, missed call marketing can help a business grow by fulfilling multiple goals or targets simultaneously. These goals or targets include creating and improving brand awareness, attracting relevant leads, and helping in the analysis of campaign.  Missed call marketing is a new age marketing method which provides an effective and efficient way of building brand promotion.

Let us dive deeper into how missed call marketing is actually beneficial for businesses today.

1. Time Optimization

Time is an essential factor in today’s world. This is true from both customer as well as the company perspective. People today do not want to spend their time in filling out long registration forms in order to register themselves for any service. Instead, a much simpler method would be for them to leave a missed call at the provided company telephone number and let the agents get back to them at a later time.

Missed Call service can help to avoid the disgruntlement of many customers and ensure that customers continue to believe in company. Also, if you look from a different side, a company effectively reduces their costs by easily connecting to the customers without employing the extra manpower and hardware at different locations.

2. Customer Data Verification

In 2016, research was conducted which showed that around 15.4 million consumers became the victims of identity theft. It is no secret, that fraudulent practices are rampant all over the internet, and most time, the fraudsters pose as agents or representatives of the companies. This is a cause of concern for companies as it can lead to bad public relations with their audience. Missed call services act as a protective barrier for companies against the bad image that the fraudster actions cause.

The way it works is, customers are asked to give a missed call on the verified and official telephone numbers provided by the company. Once the customer makes the call, the automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can verify the number of the customer. This feature is very helpful in filtering out the fake and spam calls.

Many e-commerce companies, restaurants and other online service providers can use missed call service to verify the options chosen by their customers. For instance, if their customers opt for Cash-On-Delivery option, then it must be appropriately verified to avoid any huge losses. Any such loss will be incurred on the company’s end.

3. High Flexibility

Companies can reach out to a wider demographic across both urban and rural areas, as now customers from both urban and rural societies have phones. It enables them to reach companies using their phones which is a time as well as cost-efficient method. Apart from targeting population with smartphones, missed call service can also be used by the people basic phones or landlines. This flexibility helps the companies to target wider amount of people with their missed call service.

4. Cost-effective

This is something which does not need a lot of explanation. It costs nothing for customers to give a missed call, except maybe a few seconds. Missed call service fulfils the business purpose without costing time and money to the customers. This also helps in building good customer relations.

5. Surveys

Surveys and votes conducted through messages is a huge burden on both companies and customers. And customers do not prefer this method of surveys as it asks them to invest good amount of time and effort.

Whereas miss calls for votes and surveys save a lot more time and money. It targets all kind of customers whether they are technologically well-versed or not. Even customers with landlines phones can participate in such surveys which makes the reach of the surveys wider.