Missed Call Marketing: A New-Age Marketing Technique

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Missed Call Services

November 21, 2018

5 mins read eye

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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.

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Acefone provides a broad range of cloud communication services to businesses of all sizes, which includes Hosted Phone Systems, Free Phone Numbers, and Cloud Contact Center Solutions. Being the UK's leading provider of VoIP service provider, we always strive to provide excellent customer service and high-quality custom solutions to our customers.

Toll-Free Number: The Path to Expand Your National Presence

Acefone Editor

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Contact Center

November 8, 2018

4 mins read eye

Table of content

Unlike local numbers, toll-free numbers help businesses to build up a stable national presence without investing additional time and resources. Most businesses nowadays implement toll-free numbers to provide their customers with a platform to contact customer support executives without incurring call charges. The toll-free number services require the call charges to be paid by the subscriber instead of the calling party.

The enterprises can expand their national presence by choosing the number from a variety of different toll-free numbers. Enterprises could easily get these numbers from cloud telephony service providers. In addition to the basic toll-free number, cloud telephony providers give businesses set of advanced features to increase the efficiency of their telephony system.

A number of studies suggest a consistent increase in the number of organizations switching from local phone numbers to toll-free numbers. According to Transparency Market Research,

The global toll-free services market is predicted to gain impetus on the back of sliding prices, constant growth of the call centre industry, and businesses largely concentrating on achieving customer satisfaction.

Many businesses use toll-free numbers as effective communication solutions, whereas others use toll-free services as a powerful tool for expanding their national presence. The toll-free vanity numbers further help businesses to make customers remember and recall their brands over a longer period of time. Businesses are already benefiting from toll-free services and expanding their national presence in a number of ways.

7 Ways Businesses can Leverage Toll-Free Number to Expand National Presence

1. Enable Customers to Call for Free

Many customers look for options to reach businesses quickly and inexpensively. Unlike local numbers, toll-free numbers enable customers to reach businesses by calling for free. The customers can further take advantage of this service to gather additional information about products/services by calling on these number. It gives customers a channel to connect with business without worrying about the business location or the cost of the call.

2. Relocate Your Business Without Changing Numbers

While expanding their business operations, many enterprises relocate from one location to another. Unlike local numbers, the toll-free numbers function across the country. So even if a business plans to relocate they do not need to buy a new number. The business can use the same toll-free number across multiple locations without any complexities.

3. Expand National Presence

When an enterprise expands its business operations, it needs to compete with many local companies. But most businesses lack the resources required to open offices or set up branches in each targeted region. With toll-free numbers, customers from throughout the country can reach out to the business and easily get their queries resolved without incurring call charges. Business does not need to open offices in every targeted state to enhance their local presence.

4. Personalised & Easy to Remember Vanity Numbers

While expanding their business operations, enterprises must use vanity numbers as a powerful marketing tool to make customers remember and recall the brand. The vanity numbers follow an easy-to-remember pattern which gets memorised by customers almost immediately. The combination of the vanity number and 1800 prefix makes it easier for customers to remember and call the number when they need any assistance.

5. Robust Platform to Report Queries and Gather Information

In culturally-diverse countries, the choices and preferences of customers differ across states or regions. Toll-free numbers provide customers with a robust platform to report queries or grievances. Businesses can leverage toll-free number services to make it easier for customers to ask pre & post purchase queries about products or services.

6. Transform Your Call Centre Operations

Often businesses have to upgrade their call centre operations to grow and expand successfully in culturally-diverse countries. The enterprises can integrate these numbers seamlessly with their virtual phone systems. The integration enables agents to answer calls without relying on a heavy infrastructure. Many enterprises nowadays opt for virtual toll-free numbers to modernise their call centres.

7. Reduce Overall Telecommunication Cost

As noted earlier, a business can avail toll-free services provided by many telecom operators and cloud telephony service providers. The providers require subscribers to avail toll-free services by paying a one-time setup fee and monthly fees. As businesses can expand its national presence without implementing multiple local numbers, they can easily reduce the overall telecommunication cost.

Enterprises from various industries already use toll-free numbers to expand their national and international presence. But the businesses cannot leverage toll-free number services fully without selecting an easy-to-remember toll-free number and a reliable toll-free service provider to reap these benefits. They even do some initial research to compare the toll-free number service providers elaborately.

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How to Step Up Your Customer Experience with Multi-level IVR

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Contact Center

October 18, 2018

4 mins read eye

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For a long time, business growth was synonymous to the profits your business earned. However, with the passage of technical advancements and customer awareness, this quantitative aspect of the business is overridden by the qualitative aspect, famously known as customer experience.

Starting from the product quality to customers’ patience, many factors come into play while defining your customers’ experience. Multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is one such important customer service tool. Multi-level IVR puts your company’s qualitative customer experience into shape and smoothens the process of reporting queries and grievances.

Below, let’s understand in detail how adopting a multi-level IVR into your business can enhance your customer experience.

How to Step Up Your Customer Experience with Multi-level IVR:

1. Handle Large Amount of Customer Queries

With innumerable customers constantly trying to reach you, it is practically impossible for your agents to promptly handle every customer call. Moreover, you can easily disappoint customers by not answering their calls in the first attempt.

Here, Multi-level IVR is a great relief to your business and agents. IVR solutions can easily distribute a large number of incoming customer calls into different departments depending upon the enquired query.

For instance, if your IVR presents the customers with three menu options, like below,

“Press 1 for Billing Related Queries”

“Press 2 for Product Enquiries”

“Press 3 for Customer Complaints”

Then, your incoming customer calls further gets divided into three different departments. This distribution of incoming calls to the right department makes the whole communication process less time consuming for the agents and more result-oriented for the customers.

2. Give 24*7 Customer Support

If your customer base is spread across different geographies, then chances are your customers will contact you as per their comfortable time slots. Thus, your agents cannot afford to remain offline for a long time.

“Forward-to-phone” feature easily solves this problem. You can forward incoming phone calls from anywhere to the cell phones directly. Plus, without much complication, you can easily define your call forwarding route on different numbers as per your business priority.

This round the clock flexibility helps you strengthen your brand image among customers.

3. Reduce Call Waiting Time

“All of our agents are currently busy. Please hold, and we will answer your call as soon as possible.”

Call queue messages are not pleasing to the ears of customers. In fact, according to research, 67 per cent admitted to feeling ‘annoyed’ when they are forced to wait too long. Thus, if you do not want to lose customers, reducing your call waiting time becomes crucial for your business.

Through IVR, the whole process of query handling becomes fast and efficient. By defining an intelligent call routing mechanism, you can directly forward customer calls to the expert agents. This assures a prompt query resolution and also helps you sail through the customer queries smoothly.

4. Answer Every Incoming Customer

67% of customers hang up the phone in frustration when they cannot reach.

It goes without saying that if customers are left unattended, then the probability of losing them surges by a large number. But, with limited resources and time, how do you manage to maximise your first call resolution and attend every approaching customer?

Well, the answer lies in “Auto-attendant” feature of IVR. This IVR in-built feature acts like your receptionist. A pre-recorded voice message automatically answers your incoming calls. And the best part is, you can easily change or customise your message as per your business need.

5. Analyse Call Flow with Customer Data

It is no longer enough to only stick with your business routine without assessing the real-time outcome of your business strategies. And with data analytics grabbing hold on every industry, call centres cannot remain untouched from the analytics, and prediction power its customer data holds.

So, to provide high-quality customer experience, call data analysis becomes an unavoidable part of your business routine.

You can quickly analyse the call flow statistics and customer trends on the IVR web portal by accessing the call reports and dashboards. Moreover, you can also examine customer and agent behaviour patterns by listening to their call recordings.

6. Give them Self Help Options

Not every customer query is complex and requires human intervention. For instance, if you are running a contact centre for a bank, then answer to the questions such as, “What is my account balance”, doesn’t require much time or human intelligence.

Since customers have become smart with the advent of self-help, they prefer to find a solution on their own before contacting a contact centre. Moreover, even studies show that,

40% of customers contact a call centre after they have looked for answers via self-service options.

Thus, to handle simple queries like above, multi-level IVR gives you the flexibility to add self-help menu options. Apart from saving your time and efforts, self-help options also provide peace of mind to customers as they no longer have to struggle with the long call waiting to get their answer.

Win-Win Solution

You know a solution is worth adopting when it not only benefits your business but is also making your customers’ life easy. With the IVR benefits mentioned above, such as self-help option or 24*7 support availability, there is no doubt that Multi-level IVR is going to shoot up your business productivity and customer experience to a huge extent.

So, if you are planning to adopt this win-win solution in your contact centre, then, contact us.

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What is Missed Call Marketing?

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Contact Center

August 24, 2018

4 mins read eye

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Lets deepen our connect! Give a missed call on 011 3006 3006 & get my Tweets on your mobile as SMS.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 24, 2015

The above tweet clearly represents how our honourable prime minister Mr. Narendra Modi picked an apt habit of his countrymen and used it to expand his reach. In particular, this strategy proved to be the most beneficial in reaching out to the mass of India spread across different corners of the country where uninterrupted and fast network connectivity is yet to become a norm.

Apart from the political system, private sectors like banks, job portals, and cricket channels are also utilizing this service to attract and engage customers. On top, it has proved to be a good source of lead collection by providing them with the relevant information in the form of cricket scores, job offers, or discounted plans and in return collecting their leads.

Before diving into how your business can utilize the competitive benefits of missed call marketing, let’s understand the underlying concept of missed call marketing.

What is Missed Call Marketing?

Fulfils multiple goals at the same time, such as, attracting relevant leads, creating brand awareness, analyzing different aspects of your campaign through a tracking dashboard, and much more.

In simple terms, for business, missed call marketing is a platform to market your product or services by releasing a phone number where your customers are asked to give a missed call to achieve different purposes. The call automatically gets disconnected after 2-3 rings, and the response gets stored.

This kind of marketing helps the business to fulfil multiple goals at the same time, such as, attracting relevant leads, creating brand awareness, analyzing different aspects of your campaign through a tracking dashboard, and much more.

Used Case

Below is a used case where missed call marketing has already proved to be profitable:

Few years back missed call marketing suddenly ascended, when a company successfully granted people’s most wanted wish in the form of live cricket updates. This service asked interested cricket lovers to leave a missed call on the provided numbers to continually receive game updates on their phone.

With no massive marketing expenditure except few Facebook ads and posts, this marketing campaign immediately took off, and within a few months, their reach expanded to millions of people in India.

This service asked interested cricket lovers to leave a missed call on the provided numbers to continually receive game updates on their phone.

Way to Utilize MCM for Your Business

Let’s find out few of the ways which you can adapt in your business to upscale your brand awareness and customer engagement using missed call marketing.

1. Customer Verification

For a business, it is essential to target and cater to the correct target audience so that the efficacy of its marketing efforts and the benefits of its product/services gets utilized appropriately.

Your business can use missed call service to verify the authenticity of your customers by asking them to give a missed call on your provided number. It will protect you from falling into the trap of fake customers without much efforts.

2. Lead Generation

Generating and engaging your leads is the underlying base of every business which takes a complicated turn in its execution phase. Reaching out to the potential customers becomes a task.

With missed call marketing your business generate not only leads but also attract relevant leads which have a higher rate of conversion, as only the interested people engage with your campaign by giving you a miss call response.

3. Surveys and Feedback

Even after continuous attempts, a company barely manages to collect customer feedback response on their long forms. No customer likes to fill up lengthy time-consuming feedback and surveys, according to research conducted few years back customers have started pushing back on feedback forms:

80% of customers have abandoned a survey halfway through. 52% of customers said that they would not spend more than 3 minutes filling out a feedback form.

Here is a way which assures collection of the result without a hefty cost and time investment of business or customers. Drop a simple message as below on the customer’s mobile number and ask them to give a missed call on your phone number, no. of missed calls received is equivalent to no. of satisfied customers.

“We hope we were able to resolve your queries, if you are satisfied with our services, give a missed call on xxxxxxxx”

4. Check Your Balance

Banks have already started utilizing this feature of missed call service by dropping the below message in customers’ inbox, and the customers have applauded them for the same.

To know your balance, give a missed call on xxxxxx

So, if you are a company providing any monthly subscription service or offers, this service will help your customers know the status of their plan or offer with a missed call.

5. Collect Votes

We have been using this version of missed call service since long, i.e., casting votes for our favourite performer/artist in any pole or campaign. Here, every missed call gets counted as a vote.

If your company is entering or is already present in the showbiz world, missed call service will be no less than a boon for you. Organize quiz, collect responses, and understand the reach and demographics of your show with this missed call form information.

Well, there are innumerable ways through which any business can exploit the advantages of missed call marketing in its favour, and we have already been utilizing it to simplify our many day-to-day tasks.

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Cloud Telephony – The Game Changer for E-Commerce Industry

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Cloud Telephony

July 24, 2018

7 mins read eye

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Last few years have seen a massive paradigm shift in customer’s buying behaviour pattern, inclination towards online shopping has surprisingly undergone a huge switch.

The boost in e-commerce sales can be clearly seen in the research by Statista, which forecasts a steep growth of e-commerce sales to total retail sales, from 1.7 per cent in 2015 to expected growth of 4.4 per cent by 2019.

Moreover, as per Indian Brand Equity Foundation(IBEF) latest analysis,

The Indian e-commerce industry has been on an upward growth and is expected to surpass the US to become the second largest e-commerce market in the world by 2034.

With such startling statistics, there is no denying to the fact that e-commerce game is all set to get revolutionised. However, to increase the already flowing profits, all e-commerce companies have now aligned their business strategies in the direction of customers.

As e-commerce is a virtual platform, building trust in customers automatically becomes a major area of concern. The only solution to build this virtual trust is —Communication. Remaining in constant touch with your customers provides a sense of trust, showing that you care, and are always virtually present to hear and resolve their issues.

The more your customer trusts your word; the more are the chances of not only using your service but promoting as well through word of mouth.

Now, how to build trust among your customers through on a virtual platform?

Well, the term “Cloud Telephony” is the simple answer to this question.

Wondering what it is?

Cloud Telephony in Simple Terms

Cloud Telephony is a technology which has shifted the traditional telephony infrastructure to a virtual space.

Now, as a business owner, you don’t need to invest money in assembling the physical setup or hiring dedicated staff to handle the business communication.

A cloud telephony service provider handles all the infrastructural setup for you. The service provider hosts the telephony framework over the cloud and makes it accessible to your business on a minimal cost with the help of a web portal.

Features such as bulk SMS, toll-free numbers, call monitoring, quick number portability, and many others, have added value to the whole communication process.

Let’s dive deeper into how using these business telephony services is changing the customer experience game for the e-commerce industry.

1. Timely Response to Customer Queries and Complaints

Quality of your service is majorly defined by how prompt are you in resolving customer issues and complaints, and with the rise of customers in the e-commerce industry, it becomes all the way more important to address the customer’s query without delay.

Call routing and transfer service is a boon for e-commerce firms, ensuring that no call and customer remains unattended. In case of any unavailability of agents, the call automatically gets routed to the next available agent or transferred to their mobile numbers, whichever is best suited.

This smart call routing feature assures a timely response to all the customer, by acknowledging every customer query and complaint, without delay.

2. Keeps Your Customer Real-Time Updated of their Order

As e-commerce is a virtual platform, customers have always been sceptical of the transparency it provides.

To instil trust into customers, sending them constant updates of their shipment is the best way to remain transparent and trustworthy.

Cloud telephony service providers give the flexibility to track the whole shipment process with a real-time location tracker, keeping customers informed of every update in the process with SMS reminders.

The flexibility to handle customers in real-time helps you understand customer expectations by improving the overall credibility of your brand.

3. Automated Feedback System to Understand Customers Expectations

An e-commerce firm may receive a good turnout in quantity of customers, but assuring the service quality plays a major role in retaining the flowing numbers.

With cloud telephony, any e-commerce company can now send an automatically generated feedback to customers using IVR or broadcasting services.

Quick 2-3 menu-based feedback maximises the number of response without demanding a large time investment from the customers.

4. Personalised Customer Experience with IVR and Auto-Receptionist

Nowadays, e-commerce business communicates with the customers majorly through call or online portal, so it becomes vital for the businesses to make this communication personalised and welcoming, in order to align with customer’s emotional frequency.

As it is the best chance to make a good impression on the customers’ mind, you need to make sure that customers are not left confused once they approach you.

Using IVR streamlines your customer experience by guiding the customers systematically through the menu options.

Apart from being an auto-receptionist to all customer calls, it is also the first point of query resolution for the customers. It personalises the whole customer experience from attending the call in a customised tone to guiding the callers with an intelligently defined routing system.

Across other industries such as health, education, and finance, IVR has already proven to improve the engagement, productivity, and efficiency of the calling agents drastically.

5. Easy Scalability of Communication System

Business is ever-evolving, it grows and shrinks as per customer trends and needs, so, to keep up with this change, an e-commerce business needs a scalable communication system.

During festivals or other seasonal periods, the need for communication resources tremendously increases in the e-commerce industry.

The cloud telephony providers could easily handle this on-demand scaling. You need to communicate your scaling request with the service providers simply, and it gets done in a matter of a few minutes.

Flexibility to adjust your business needs and expenses make cloud telephony a very promising option for the e-commerce business.

6. Quick Data Recovery to Protect Any Business Loss

In the e-commerce industry, a business can never go offline; customers now want instant access round the clock. So, no business can afford to compromise on the business continuity and availability. Cloud undoubtedly proves to be the best solution to any technical disaster recovery.

Let’s presume your wired telephony system experiences a major technical issue and goes down, which means no customer can now approach you until the time your communication system is up and running.

This unpredictability easily gets washed away with cloud telephony system, as soon as any server faces a technical glitch, the backup server is immediately put into action to keep your communication system working.

The cloud has already proved to be the best disaster recovery mechanism throughout all industries, saving a huge business loss beforehand.

7. In-depth Data Analysis for Smart Business Decisions

As the famous saying goes,

Change is the Only Constant

This statement holds true for the businesses as well.

E-commerce is one such industry which constantly remains in touch with the customer’s needs, so understanding customers and their varying behaviour patterns become crucial to this industry’s sustenance.

Number of incoming calls, queries, call-resolution time, outbound feedback calls, and many such metrics help bring the right data onto the table for big decision making.

If you are a large e-commerce firm with millions of data, then integrating your cloud telephony system and its data with big data analytics is sure to yield some great customer behaviour insights.

8. Online Fraud Detection via Auto-generated Calls

Online fraud has been one of the biggest threat to the online business industry. Identity theft and card fraud continue to be the biggest hampering areas of the e-commerce industry.

According to a report, an estimated loss of $21.84 billion was caused by payment card frauds globally in 2015.

Cloud telephony companies have joined hands with the e-commerce industry in fighting against the fraudulent orders.

Sensing any fraudulent activity in the form of costly orders or repeated failed transaction attempts, e-commerce companies now send an auto-generated order verification call to the customers before finalising.

This attempt by cloud telephony industry to save companies from online thefts has safeguarded e-commerce and its customer’s services.

9. Bulk SMS Service to Broadcast Promotional Offers

SMS is undeniably an impressive platform for customer engagement especially for the e-commerce industry whose customer base is dominated by smartphone glued millennials.

E-commerce industry collaborated with cloud telephony to leverage this power of text messages.

The bulk SMS service provided by cloud telephony vendor steps up the game of promotion for the e-commerce companies, as now companies could send their promotional offers to a large number of customers in one go with a minimal investment.

Collaborating Digital Powers

On one side, e-commerce has reshaped the customers buying behaviour, and on the other side cloud telephony is bridging the trust gap between e-commerce and customers, smoothening the whole process from placing an order to post-delivery services,

This powerful collaboration of both the platform is creating a superior customer experience thereby changing the game of both the industries by making the customers’ buying experience effortless.

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Top 6 Benefits of Having a Virtual Number for Your Business

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Contact Center

July 6, 2018

5 mins read eye

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The advent of multinational corporations and manufacturing units around the world has helped businesses transcend geopolitical boundaries. These large-scale operations require a robust yet flexible communication system.

Coordination with a truly diverse team from across the globe poses its own challenges. Even a simple task like finding a common slot for a meeting can become cumbersome due to different time zones. Technical glitches and unstable Internet connections add to the woes.

Cloud telephony offers powerful solutions to overcome communication and coordination challenges in all aspects of your business. A virtual number is one such solution, facilitating a seamless connection with all your stakeholders, 24×7 and from anywhere in the world.

Business virtual numbers offer a plethora of benefits, but before jumping into the details, let us get a broad idea about virtual numbers and their functioning.

What is a Virtual Number?

As the name suggests a virtual phone number is not connected via any tangible phone line or SIM card but is rather connected via the cloud. Also known as Direct Inward Dialing (DID) or access number, it is used to redirect calls from a published or centralised number to any other destination like a landline or a mobile phone. When a customer dials in a business virtual number, it is seamlessly forwarded in accordance with a pre-set logic, to your personal or office number.

Benefits of a Business Virtual Number

It has various advantages, ranging from reduced international call charges to increased local brand presence, round the clock availability, and more. Here are the prominent advantages and features of a business virtual number:

1. Optimise Expenditure

The need for extensive hardware set-up and related infrastructure is redundant with virtual numbers. In addition, expenditure on related activities like regular maintenance, extra staff, emergency repairs, etc. also becomes obsolete. Instead, you pay an inexpensive subscription fee to a provider for all these services.

Furthermore, service providers usually offer a “pay-as-you-use” model that allows you to scale your operations while putting you on the driving seat of your expenditures.

2. Personal vs Professional

All hardworking professionals understand the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance. However, entrepreneurs and business owners are often overwhelmed by numerous calls throughout the day. A virtual number helps segregate your personal and working hours without causing any disruption to your business. Calls to the same business number can be forwarded to a different number based on the time. For example, during your working hours (say, between 9 AM to 5 PM), calls can be directly routed to you or your office, while otherwise, they can be routed to a teammate or be sent to voicemail.

3. Enhance Local Presence

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. International corporations need to blend in with the local populace in order to create ties with the community. A local number is the best way to achieve this balance. It helps people better associate with a brand while enhancing the trust factor. Moreover, customers are more likely to answer a call from a local number, i.e., from their own city or state as compared to an unfamiliar code.

Businesses can opt for varying numbers for different cities. This would help your agents provide improved and customised information catering to a particular region and also help you analyse region-specific call data.

4. 24×7 Connectivity

In this day and age, round-the-clock connectivity is imperative for businesses. Loss of potential clients can be devastating for a company, and hence, you cannot afford to miss a single call. A virtual number automates this task for you, readily routing numbers to the set destination. This lets you answer calls from any location, and even on the go. It also allows operational flexibility for your agents who need not work from the physical office space anymore. Incorporating this technology in your communication model ensures that you never miss a call again.

5. IVR Integration

Ever wished that your customer calling from Punjab is automatically greeted in Punjabi, while a customer from West Bengal is greeted in Bengali? Virtual numbers integrated with IVR technology help achieve this, and much more!

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a powerful telephony solution that automates all your communication needs. Using a pre-recorded message, it greets all incoming calls and routes them to the best-suited team or agent. Furthermore, callers can enjoy self-service tools along with prioritised service using the technology. Companies benefit from reduced wait time and improved analytics, thereby improving the overall efficiency.

6. Number Portability

A published and well-marketed business number often becomes a beacon of your identity. Changing your number midway can hamper your sales and hurt your brand image.

A virtual number allows easy portability, ensuring your number stays yours! In case you want to shift your business to a new city or try a new cloud telephony service provider, you can easily do so by paying an affordable number transfer fee.

Conclusion

A virtual number is an intelligent solution for your business communication needs. It offers powerful features like call-routing, auto-notifications, and more at economical prices. Virtual number and cloud telephony solutions have already made their mark in the business world by amplifying the quality of customer experience and business growth. It is the right time to incorporate these technological developments into your business model and reach greater heights.

To know more about virtual numbers and cloud telephony solutions, and how these can help boost your business, read our expert blogs.

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How Cloud Telephony Works?

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Cloud Telephony

June 20, 2018

6 mins read eye

Table of content

Technological changes are a continuously evolving process which keeps every business on their toes, and one such revolution has been the introduction of “cloud” in the communication sector. Prior to the cloud telephony technology, every business had to maintain a separate IT personnel to handle the array of wires and hardware in order to ensure a smooth communication — in and outside the organization.

As technological changes started capping the industry, these wires, hardware, and software became obsolete. With the cloud, a business becomes independent from the installation, IT personnel or system maintenance cost. The cloud telephony service provider now handles all the setup, maintenance and upgradation of the telephony infrastructure on the cloud. As consumers of these services, business only needs an interface to connect with the telephony server to get started.

What is Cloud Telephony?

Cloud telephony is the technology where communication devices are hosted over service provider’s premises and are made accessible to the customers through the cloud. Further, a web interface is provided to the customers to connect with this cloud-hosted system.

In the past, when the businesses planned to scale or migrate their office space, then concerns like the cost of buying a new telephone line or time delay in the infrastructural setup would start to surface their mind — making the whole migration process a cumbersome task. But, with cloud telephony, businesses simply need to inform their service providers of any such change, and the rest is then taken care of automatically.

Cloud telephony offers many more seamless benefits to your business. Let’s look at few of them below:

1. Lower Cost of Ownership

Most companies save around 15-30% on operational expenses. The need for resources is lowered as the whole set up is virtualized which directly affects the overall spending of the enterprise. The pay-per-use model makes it more affordable for the small and medium enterprise businesses to adapt.

2. Reliable with High Uptime

Multiple servers are kept in data centers to handle any unexpected technical failure. If one system fails, another set of the system automatically takes its place to starts the services with no time lag.

3. Easy Scalability

Shape of no business remains constant – every business is bound to grow or shrink. To keep up with the ever-changing need, cloud telephony services come very handily. Any no. of users/channels can be added or removed from the server as per the requirement.

4. Always Updated

Software industry keeps expanding and adding new features for better performance. To sync your communication system with these changes, service providers keep updating the software and hardware at the backend without affecting the user’s usage. Keeping your services updated without investing any extra effort or time is the major benefit of cloud telephony technology.

How Does Cloud Telephony Work?

Cloud telephony functioning is no different from the traditional way, the major distinguishing factor between the two is – former is located on the premise of the customer/business itself and latter is installed over service provider’s premises which is accessible through the cloud network.

how-cloud-telephony-works

When a customer dials the call — it is first redirected to Hosted Public Branch Exchange (PBX) on the cloud. This transfer of data is made through a Primary Rate Interface (PRI) line which is connected to the telephony server with a PRI card (PRI line is a telecommunication standard used on an ISDN to carry voice, video, data, and other network services between the user and the network).

This hosted PBX (which is provided by the service provider) stores the necessary phone numbers and information to decide routing structure for every call. All your office phone extension is connected to the hosted PBX, so every phone call landing on PBX decides it’s best suitable agent after browsing through these the set priorities in the system.

PBX can even block certain calls — if the service provider or customer explicitly sets it in the rules. Once the server decides the best-suited agent for the request, it immediately connects the customer and the agent over the phone line.

Call transfer between the agents is comparatively a faster process as all the agents are connected to the same umbrella of hosted PBX.

Why Should Business Go for Cloud Telephony?

Businesses can utilize multiple features to fasten their everyday processes and profit-making, but there are few key features of the cloud telephony services which makes it the best communication mode for the business:

1. Voicemail

Voicemail is a method of storing voice messages electronically. This feature is particularly beneficial in the cases where all the agents are busy on other line or are unavailable due to other reasons. The message is stored as a voice recording on the local storage — which is later retrieved by the agents and responded.

2. Call Forwarding

This feature allows the business owner or agents to remain available for the calls— in case they are not physically present in the office. You can utilize the cloud services to forward the incoming calls to your number. Store a list of forwarding numbers in the system to automatically forward your calls to those numbers according to the set priority. The caller remains untouched by the whole forwarding process.

3. Automatic Attendant

The Interactive Voice Response system is a smart feature which helps the business to automatically attend/answer the call with a recorded greeting message. The automatic attendant replaces the manual task of attending and transferring the calls. This feature saves a lot of human costs which used to be spent on hiring a dedicated resource to attend the incoming calls.

4. Call Recording and Monitoring

Once the business is set up, the next step lies in the maintenance which can only be achieved by constantly monitoring your processes. The call recording feature is one such facility which allows business to record every incoming and outgoing call depending upon the business requirement. This feature helps both the customers and the business in maintaining the authenticity of the conversation and the business processes.

5. Ease of Use with Desktop, Web and Mobile Applications

To utilize all the above features, an interface is provided by the cloud service provider. To expand the usage and flexibility of use, this interface is easily accessible through the desktop and web platforms. Many service providers have now developed apps for easy accessibility of services for the agents. With the mobile apps, agents/admins can at any time access and monitor their calls on their fingertips.

6. Integration With Other Systems

There are many clouds telephony software’s which adds value to cloud telephony processes by providing the integration flexibility. You can integrate your CRM, industry-specific management system or other software’s into your cloud telephony systems to maximize your usage.

Final Words

According to Indian VoIP Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2017, “The market will witness phenomenal growth (CAGR) of 27% for next five years regarding the number of VoIP subscribers.”

So, as the number suggests, there is no denying to the fact cloud is the new revolution in the market. And customers are welcoming this revolution with open mind and arms. So, it’s high time to adopt cloud telephony into your business to amplify your customer experience and profits.

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Why Indian Real Estate Companies Should Use an IVR?

Acefone Editor

Author

IVR Service

May 11, 2018

4 mins read eye

Table of content

Leads, leads, and more leads!

This line makes every business owner face shine with glee, and why not? Isn’t business all about leads and their conversion?

One such industry that remains flooded with leads is Real Estate. A constant demand and supply throughout the year keep this industry thriving and this outpour of customers, many times leads to delayed response. According to a study conducted by Prof. James. B. Oldroyd at MIT, your chances of reaching leads within 5 mins versus 30 minutes drop by 21 times.

With the advent of mobile phones and affordable calling rates, phone calls have become the most favored option of all the other communication medium. So, the need of the hour lies in opting for a comprehensive solution which can handle a large number of customer calls simultaneously and streamline the lead management process of the real-estate industry.

Interactive Voice Response – A Proven Solution

Cloud-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems has solved the lead collection and management trouble vastly by automatically attending, managing, and routing the calls. It broke barriers restricting the growth of the real estate business. Let’s understand how every process in the real estate business can exploit the unlimited benefits of IVR.

Promote Your Pre-Bookings

As a Real Estate owner, you have already fought many battles starting from land negotiations to paperwork complexities and from selecting an excellent construction design to finding workforce. Now, the next step towards your success lies in your pre-launch booking promotional strategies.

IVR here cements promotions with your prospects by utilizing its features such as Toll-Free numbers, Text/Voice Broadcasting, Click-to-Call or API Integration in every stage.

How can you exactly use these services in your processes at different stages?

Once your land acquisition and construction details are finalized, broadcast the details of the site over Text/Voice to your collected leads.
Give a Call-to-Action in your text messages by providing a Missed Call number to collect interested leads.
Integrate your IVR system with CRM software and store information of your interested leads for a smooth follow-up process.
Buy a Toll-Free number and release it on your banners and billboards.
Send Voice Broadcasts to potential customers in their local language to increase your reach.

Manage Your Leads

Once you are done with the pre-booking campaign, it is time to reap the benefits of promotion. Handling incoming pool of calls is a humongous task. However, after opting for IVR solution, many tasks get aligned that help agent automatically to channelize their efforts in lead management.

How can you utilize these services in handling leads?

Design your toll-free routing structure in a way to direct your queries of different geographical areas to various A caller that wants to inquire about the “A” state will be redirected to the department “A”, on the selection of the correct option.
Keep a log of all the missed calls not to miss any potential customers and return a call as soon as possible.
Track the success or failure of the marketing campaigns through different virtual numbers assigned to every campaign.
Send constant SMS updates of site development to the interested leads and keep them engaged with your services.

Ensure Customer Retention

As soon as a lead is converted into a customer, your yardstick of customer satisfaction starts to stretch or shrink. Converting a lead inevitably defines the success of your sales process, but customer retention and satisfaction shape the foundation of many future successes.

In fact, even a 5% increase in customer retention can boost your profits between 25 to 95 percent. So, following up with your existing customers is an indispensable factor in your business. How to strive for customer satisfaction with IVR features?

Send regular construction SMS updates of their property to the customers and remove any skepticism that might be circulating their mind.
Broadcast your toll-free number to all your customers so that they can inquire whenever in need.
Send a voice broadcast, in case of any major changes or decisions of your business and build trust among customers.
Create a separate option in your IVR for customer grievances and record them for thorough analyzation for action.
Conduct customer surveys regularly through a voice broadcasting channel or SMS broadcast to remain updated of your customer’s expectations.

Conclusion

The real estate industry is undoubtedly the most precarious and loaded sector, which increases the relevance of adapting to IVR solutions even more. With the increasing number of real estate customers and owners, IVR is sure to automatize half manual processes and decrease the day-to-day challenges of this sector. Hence, you definitely can’t overlook the importance of profit yielded or lost from every lead.

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How A Missed Call Service Helps You Get More Customers

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Author

Contact Center

April 19, 2018

4 mins read eye

Table of content

In the busy 21st century, everyone is running out of time. Technology, therefore, has to be constantly improved to meet the demands of the masses and allow them to do more work in less time. In the business world, every second of attention to your product counts, and so it is now far more essential to make the best use of the technology.

To effectively combine technology with business management, cloud-based telephony companies have come up with smart solutions like Missed Call Service, SMS Alerts, and others to keep your customers updated without significant time investment.

People across the world are using Missed Call Service for a variety of reasons which goes in proportional to their personal & professional needs. Let’s look at some of the compelling features of this service which can help you gain more customers with minimal efforts:

1) Optimization of Time

Save your potential customers from the pain of filling up lengthy forms. Instead, ask them to give a missed call on your number, and let your agents give them a call back to understand their requirements.

This saves you many disappointed customers who might face a tough time connecting with your agents. The ease of connecting to your leads without adding an extra burden of money or time caters to a large number of potential customers, who can be either a small-town farmer having a basic phone or a business owner having very less time.

2) Verification of Data

According to research, 15.4 million consumers have been the victim of identity theft in 2016. Fraudulent practices over the internet have always been a cause of worry for the enterprise owners while running their businesses through an online platform. Missed Call Service is providing a protective shield to these enterprises by authenticating every approaching customer.

You can ask potential customers to give a missed call if they are really interested in your service or you can ask them to give a missed call to verify their details. As soon as a customer makes a missed call, the IVR automatically verifies the number with its intelligently designed algorithms. This feature is particularly helpful to filter out the unwanted and spam calls to enter your system.

Restaurants and other businesses can use this feature to verify customers opting for Cash on Delivery option. If a caller inputs incorrect data on your application or website, then sending them your product may incur a huge cost.

Hence, a missed call service verifying a customer’s authentication through their mobile number can save a lot of money and avoid delays in your services.

3) Flexibility

In 2017 February, India’s telecom subscriber base touched the 1.18 billion mark including mobile & landline users. So, connecting with your customers over landline phones still remains a count which cannot be overlooked.

Here, missed call service becomes worthier for the business owners as customers from the platform can reach out to you through a missed call, leaving no target customers untouched. This feature in specific helps in reaching out to non-tech savvy customers or customers residing in remote places. They can give a missed call to your cloud-based number to show their interest in your products.

It’s flexibility to provide varied functionalities increases its usability and flexibility to be used in different of ways. Integration of the missed call data with CRM enhances your follow-up process, as it stores your missed call contacts in the database along with their follow-up log.

4) Cost Effectiveness

Missed Call Service also comes easy on the customer’s wallet. Internet-based and SMS-based campaigns incur costs. A Missed Call-based Campaign, on the other hand, costs nothing at all and yet works in an equally effective manner.

Cost-effectiveness makes missed call service attractive to the potential customers. As customers face no restriction while approaching you.

5) Conduct Surveys

Sending an SMS to participate in a poll has always been a costly affair for the voters. Spending 3rs/vote acted as a barrier to the process of voting which eventually started affecting customer’s enthusiasm.

Stepping in here, missed call service greatly revolutionised the e-voting & surveys. It simplified the whole process by replacing the message responses with a missed call response.

SMS voting only allowed the customers with a mobile phone to participate. The introduction of missed call voting overcame this setback as well and allowed customers with landlines to be an active participant of surveys/polls.

6) Lead Generation

Generating leads is essential to any profit-oriented enterprise. Here, Missed call service acts as a bonus for your sales team. Facilitating your customers with the option of missed call organically inclines them towards your service, as now their process of approaching you becomes hassle-free and eliminates many intermediate levels of communication.

RoI of missed call lead generation is easily trackable against various marketing campaigns. It also enhances your lead management process and keeps you updated of customers who could be re-targeted in future.

If you would like to get an easy to use, reliable and economical missed call service of impeccable quality for your company. Call Now.

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Top 5 Benefits of Voice Broadcasting for Your Business

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Voice Broadcasting

March 9, 2018

3 mins read eye

Table of content

Gone are the days when putting a company’s life-size banner on the roadside shinning billboards or distributing pamphlets were the only options to make a long-lasting mark on customers’ minds.

Nowadays, cloud technology has largely influenced the publicity strategies being developed by businesses and whipped away the traditional methods by offering more cost-effective solutions to a far-reaching target audience.

Voice broadcast has emerged to be the most efficient way and it has also overcome the limitations of traditional ways for advertising. Voice broadcast allows you to connect instantly with customers in various languages and get your messages across with minimal human intervention in the process.

Voice broadcasting has made it possible to cut the cost by eliminating a large number of staff handling the calls and removing the hardwired phone connection lines with the cloud-based digitized approach.

Let’s see how voice broadcasting helps your business grow by making an efficient customer outreach.

1. Customer Friendly

If your target customer resides in distant corners of the world, voice broadcasting gives the flexibility to personalize your language & message according to that region. This helps in adding a personal touch to your messages. Every business looks for a steady customer base and with the help of voice broadcasting, every single message you want to convey finds a receiving end.

2. Message Uniformity

Message inconsistency is the most vulnerable part of broadcasting, a large organization with a huge staff assigned for the same task may tamper the consistency and authenticity of the original message resulting in a lack of transparency in the process.

Voice broadcasting helps to prevent this drawback by transmitting a voice recorded information, after quality & credibility assurance from the dedicated authorities. It ensures the consistency between the original message and the final transmitted message.

3. Easily Affordable

Making an impactful change in the running of a business is complemented by a hefty cost, Voice broadcasting, on the contrary, reduces your set up cost as cloud telephony companies provide a software which supports your telephony services without any additional hassle of setting up phone lines or allotting a dedicated resource to make 1000 calls.

Voice broadcasting also offers add-on value services like admin management portal or calls analytics graph make it a good buy for the small firms, in search of affordability and quality.

4. Manage Campaigns on a Click

Running a campaign is a humungous task and tracking the history of thousands of calls is not that easy without a substantial human effort. Voice broadcasting streamlines the call tracking processes by generating a detailed call tracking list with the information about the number of voice calls made and how many of them were successful.

Admin can also create different categories and assign different voice messages for the same according to their requirement and release multiple voice broadcast at the same time catering different customer needs.

5. Flexible

Schedule your recorded call according to the customer’s availability without affecting their already planned day. If the voice broadcasting service provider has a downloadable mobile app, then all the statistics related to the voice broadcast stay clear and visible with a better sense of communication.

Voice broadcasting software stores a huge database of numbers reducing the last shred of human complication involved in the process.

Voice Broadcasting – Adding Value

With a race to reach out to a maximum number of people, voice broadcasting has unprecedently proved to be beneficial for the government in spreading awareness about the newly launched schemes, running political campaigns or sending out promotional offers.

Businesses aiming to advertise their services with minimum investments are leveraging this emerging opportunity to the best of their abilities and receiving a tremendous ROI.

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