Outbound voice broadcasting IVR

Few days back a client from Philippines approached me with a very common problem regarding his outbound call centre. He was into providing insurance cover to the EU customers. But his agents were not having a local accent because of which the EU customers would take a lot of time to understand their intent of calling. Thus the conversion rate was very low.

So he came up with this idea where he would play a local accent pre recorded IVR for his customers so that they could follow it. Later after the initial introduction the call would get diverted to the agent. Then onwards the agent would talk to the customers only when required and would navigate them through related set of questions played one by one as pre-recorded messages through the IVR. The agent would remain a part of the three way conference. In case the customer needed help the agent would just pick up from there and help him choose the options correctly.

Due to this, the agent intervention has decreased, the problem of accent has been fixed and the business has geared up. As the whole business for call centres depends upon the quality of interaction between the two parties the IVRs have taken a very important place here.

The Call Back Plug-in for websites and Blogs

There has been such a wide-spread rage of the social media, weblogs and networking sites these days which are being used along with the company's own website for marketing the products. Hundreds of people get clustered around a product but it is not always necessary that they will get converted into leads and further into your customers.

This happens because there is a lack of instant contact between the company and the visitor. Either the visitor has to call, or send an E-mail or fill a lengthy form to retrieve the contact details. For a company it is not possible to always be in direct touch with the visitors. But this “Call Back Plug-in” that we have specially created would drive away all such difficulties.

This plug-in would ask an interested visitor to enter his contact number so that the company calls him back immediately and thus the visitor can get to know more about the company as well as its services. This will not only help the company to grab new opportunities but also help in converting them into their customers. It can be embedded in the blogs** or websites. Now coming to the most interesting part, as soon as the person enters his number the company's phone will directly call him. There is no need of manual dialing. Thus all the delay is by-passed and the “call back” gives the customer the feeling that he matters to the company. With this Plug-in a company is just a Missed Call away it seems.

**The plug-in version is available for WordPress and Websites. Mail us your requirements at mktg@bicserver.com

VoIP literacy in INDIA

Though the Indian corporate houses have seen an IT boom and are now witnessing a downturn, they are still not that focussed on unified communication, which can help them in cost cutting effectively. Only exceptions have been the call centres who have welcomed VoIP with both hands for very obvious reasons like low cost international calls and least cost routing. But still not many I.T. departments are gearing up for this IP phone revolution.
There have been forums, webinars, blogs as well as dedicated websites spread all over the internet that preach about Unified Communication but the government interventions in the name of protecting the level playing field has somehow never helped the VoIP industry to grow the way it should have been. VoIP not only allows you to have cheap calling rates but it also provides you with customizable and intelligent services which will help the businesses to grow faster. Not only the established businesses have an advantage but one can also start using the VoIP applications.
There are many cases that I have come across in more than 10 years of my experience in this industry, where non-technical people have come up with graet ideas like creating a voip call shop or virtual voip calling to earn great bucks. But unfortunately all these people are not from India. Thus I feel that its very essential for India to know the pros and cons of every techonolgy otherwise it would be a difficult challenge to bring concepts like NGN and mobile number portability to India. There has to be a unanimous acceptance for VoIP.

Voip call shop solution

There is one cybercafe in a tourist spot in Spain where people come for browsing. The Cafe-owner saw business opportunity to provide visitors facility to make VoIP calls. He thought of giving this facility to its users to call on very cheap rates.

As he is already having his SIP Provider so he wanted to integrate his 8 port billing meter to generate bills and charge the users according to their usage.So he got an IPPBX integrated with his SIP provider and billing system and later configured an analog telephony adapter(ATA) to connect regular analog phones for the visitors to place the VoIP calls. The billing was done after the call got over in the cafe itself over a billing machine which could record the bill status for four lines.

Later they also want to start virtual calling cards facility for their customers wherein they can make calls even from outside after leaving the cyber cafe. This is one of the very well thought applications of VoIP.

Sharing T1 between two branches

A multinational pharmaceutical company had been facing many problems because they had to separate their Marketing and Production department due to statutory reasons, but in order to minimize the cost they wanted that this should be done while retaining their existing phone numbers as they were already known to customers. They were having T1 lines which could carry 24 digitized voice channels. Those departments were having some selected users who had direct incoming numbers and the rest of users were reachable via Receptionist or IVR.

As they implemented an IPPBX, it allowed them to solve their problems and they also got many other features which further enhanced their productivity and reduced their OPEX.

Apart from the basic features there were some additional features like:-

1. Directory-Which allows users to search the phone numbers by names.
2. Click to call-facility for outlook
3. Time interval setting-Which means the calls get connected to home extensions of senior
management and after office hours will be diverted to IVR.
4. Dial Plan-To decide that how the incoming calls can be routed when someone is calling from
outside.