CallFire

by Kimberly Kohatsu

Not everyone realizes that there is a recently unveiled toll-free area code, 855, available.

An 855 phone number works exactly like any 800 number (800, 877, 866, 888). The benefit, however, is because these numbers are brand new, you can be assured no other business has ever owned or used this number in the past. Your business won’t get any calls intended for a previous owner, which can sometimes happen when numbers get recycled.

Ready to try one? CallFire makes it easy. Toll-free numbers cost only $2/month. The initial charge of $6 will cover your first three months with that number, and after that, we bill your number on a month-to-month basis. So, if your marketing campaign ends and you no longer need that 855 number, you don’t have to keep paying for it. But, if you want to hold on to it, you certainly can, and it continues to be only $2 per month.

When people call in to your 855 number, you can send them through one of your CallFire IVR menus, or you can simply forward them to a number you already use. Calls are billed at 5 cents per minute, rounded up to the nearest minute.

1) To get started, sign up for a CallFire account. It’s free to sign up, and there are no minimums, no set-up fees, and no hidden charges.

2) Then, once you’re logged in, navigate to the Numbers tab up top, and select “Buy Toll-Free or Local.”

3) You’ll then see a list of available 855 numbers. Choose any of them, or if you need more, choose a whole bunch. Then hit the green button. If you’d rather have a local number, write the area code you’re interested in in the ( ) box and click “Find Area Code.” The process is the same.

4) Your new number will be ready right away, but a common mistake made is forgetting to enable your number. To do that, go to the “My Numbers” page and click Enable. You should see your campaign’s status will turn to “Running.”

A common question we get at CallFire is how to add numbers to a campaign that’s already running. If the campaign has finished, you’ll want to create a subset campaign, and you can learn how to do that in this nifty video featuring our solutions guru Ryan.

If your campaign is still active, you can use the “Copy Campaign” functionality, which will save you a lot of time. All your settings, inputs, and sound files will be preserved so that you don’t have to recreate them.

The first step is to log into your Admin account and select the campaign that you’d like to duplicate. Put a check in the checkbox all the way over to the left.

Next, look up top at the Campaign Control drop-down menu. Choose the “Copy Campaign” selection and hit “go.”

Input a new campaign name in the New Campaign Name field.

Next you’ll be asked to add more numbers to your copied campaign. You can either choose a PhoneBook that’s maintained in your CallFire account, or you can upload a new list of numbers (.csv, .xls, or .xlsx formats). Renew your agreement to the legal terms, and hit “submit.”

Your copied campaign has saved all your original campaign settings, and is now ready to run.

Have questions? Email support@CallFire.com, or attend a weekly webinar.

Do you use a hosted-CRM utility?  Do you use CallFire’s Cloud Call Center?  If your answer is ‘Yes’ to both of these questions, your CCC agents might benefit from a link to your CRM platform, directly within the CallFire Agent Popup screen.

1. Export the necessary data from your web-based CRM. If you are unsure how to do this, search for “Exporting leads to Excel” in your web-based CRM’s FAQ or Help section.
2. Be sure to include the unique ID for each customer as one of the items
3. Once you have exported the list to excel, you must turn the leads into unique urls
   • To do this, first copy-paste the piece of the URL that precedes the customer’s unique ID (in most cases, this should be the same URL each time) in a blank field in excel
   • In the blank row to the right run the following command script: =(X2&Y2), where column “X” is the column where the URL appears and column “Y” is the column where the unique ID appears. This will combine the items in each of those columns so that the resulting piece will now appear as the unique URL with a link to that customer’s profile in theCallFire agent interface.

4. Upload the list to an existing Cloud Call Center campaign or create a campaign for this list of contacts.Before making phonecalls, make sure that you have already logged into your web-based CRM account. This will prevent the link1 tab from taking over the CallFire agent interface when you click on it.

Watch the video: Toll Free Call Tracking
Email us: calltracking@callfire.com
Call: 877.888.4515

Do you use a hosted-CRM utility?  Do you use CallFire’s Virtual Call Center?  If your answer is ‘Yes’ to both of these questions, your VCC agents might benefit from a link to your CRM platform, directly within the CallFire Agent Popup screen.

When a call is connected, your agent sees the SugarCRM contact instantly.  Here is an example:

How it works
If you embed this code in your Excel list, for each phone number, it will place a clickable link in the Agent pop-up window.   The link will open your browser based CRM.

Example code
2132212200<name of person>,<iframe src=”<<<<<  embed html link here >>>>>>>>>>>” width=”100%” height=”500″><p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p></iframe>/

<a href=”<<<insert crm link here>>>”><img src=”<<<insert image location here>>>” alt=”Call Me Now!” /></a>

Don’t want to use Javascript? Try:
<a href=”<<<put link here>>>” target=”callfireCrm”>Open CRM</a>

Want even more control? You can take your integration a step further with CallFire Voice APIs.   Developers can easily use SOAP web services calls to inject data directly to your Agent’s CRM interface, in real time!   Visit the CallFire Developer Wiki or call 877.897.3473. 

iThere are a few management features on your call details page for your campaign. Here is how you use them:

1) Search for a phone number. Use the search box on top, type in any number and we’ll filter your results.

2) Click the delete icon for a row and the number will be deleted from your campaign. Only uncalled numbers can be deleted.

3) Click the yellow icon to add the number to your internal do not call list. This is a quick way to manually add a number.

Here are a few videos to make everyone’s lives a little bit easier.  If you’re a new CallFire user, these videos will walk you through the campaign-creation process.  (Non-techies looking for a more detailed walkthrough, please click here for a detailed, 7-minute Voice Broadcast campaign-setup walkthrough.)

Will, one of CallFire’s seasoned support reps, ran into a situation where he needed to scan for dupes real quick in an exported CSV.

He found, If you combine these two steps you can do a sort and find it right away:
http://www.officearticles.com/excel/dealing_with_duplicate_records_in_microsoft_excel.htm
http://www.usd.edu/trio/tut/excel/26.html

Thanks Will!

We’ve been getting a few phone calls about data safety.  Rest assured, CallFire.com does not resell your leads!   A complete copy of the policy can be found here:  CallFire Privacy Policy.   A general summary of our policy is provided below.

Customer Data and Uploaded Leads
Customers of CallFire.com use the Company’s services to host data and information (“Customer Data”).
CallFire.com will not review, share, distribute, or reference any such Customer Data except as may be required by law. Individual records of Customer Data may be viewed or accessed only for the purpose of resolving a problem, support issues, or suspected violation of the CallFire.com Terms of Service, or as may be required by law.

We now support more advanced reporting for your campaigns. You can generate reports for all your campaigns, the current feature list is:

• Total calls made by all campaigns
• Calls distributed by day, hour, week, month and duration
• Filtering reports to show only selected campaigns or call status
• Comparison reports using Campaigns, transfer number, call status and Agents

The combination of all these features is very powerful. Take a look at the howto video: