CallFire

This weekend, CallFire developers rolled out a great new feature: Inbound telephone service.  Now, you can buy Toll Free & Local telephone numbers with only a few clicks on our website!

This powerful new feature allows you to track which advertising campaigns generate you the most sales calls.

Screenshot:

So, what does this mean for you?

Buy Toll Free or Local numbers

Purchase one, or thousands of numbers for your business.  By displaying unique phone numbers to each of your advertising campaigns, your sales team can monitor which ads are driving the most phone calls.  And of course, with CallFire’s pay-as-you-go platform, you can stop receiving calls on your new number at any time.

Nationwide Call Forwarding

All local & toll free phone numbers can forward to your existing phone number.   Your cost during a forwarded call is 5c/minute for local numbers and 8c/minute for Toll Free.

Know which ADs make your phones ring

Create useful reports and visualize your callers patterns.  You may find that some campaigns drive more sales calls than others.  This data can be used to make valuable marketing decisions.

Developer tools and APIs

Integrators, please visit http://www.CallFire.com/dev to learn more about CallFire’s Voice APIs.  Publishers & large advertisers can use APIs to purchase & provision DIDs.  Call us to learn more at 877.897.FIRE.

Only $2/month + 8c/min

For Toll Free numbers… for local numbers, it’s only: $1/month + 5c/min.

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. 

CallFire has some new mailing lists for all our users. Please sign up to get the latest information and release news!

Developers List Features

• Latest Updates
• Bug Fixes and Work Arounds
• Maintenance information
• …and more!

Newsletter Features

• Latest Features
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• Tips and Tricks
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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.)

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:

The free CallFire webinar is presented as a two part series:

Session 1:  How to use a Virtual Call Center and Predictive Dialer to optimize my collections agent’s time.

Preparing an Excel list of my delinquent customer phone numbers.
Optimizing ROI by developing a thoughtful callback strategy.
Monitoring collections agents that work from home.

Session 2:  How to use Voice Broadcast to send monthly reminder calls to delinquent accounts.

Preparing an Excel list of my delinquent customer phone numbers.
Developing an effective recorded message for my voice broadcast campaign.
Creating follow-up call-campaigns for continued delinquency.

To sign up for CallFire’s free “DIY Debt Collection” webinar, please submit your contact information here: https://www.callfire.com/dialer/usersignup.do

To learn more about CallFire products and services, please visit: http://www.callfire.com/dialer/cm/info/products_and_services.html

To speak with a CallFire representative, please call 877.897.FIRE.

Response durations may change due to Answering Machine Detection and the amount of background noise during the call.  For example a loud TV, screaming children, or even a barking dog at the location of the recipient, can cause fluctuations in sound that may cause small delays in when your message plays.

Recipients must say “hello” clearly, for your message to play immediately.   Users should always say “hello” when answering test calls yourself.  Rogue background sounds, delays in saying hello, or even saying hello multiple times, may cause small variances in when your message begins to play.   This will cause your overall call duration to increase or decrease by a few seconds.

For more information on how AMD works, please read:
http://www.callfire.com/blog/2008/09/19/faq-how-does-answering-machine-detection-work/

To turn off AMD completely, choose the last campaign type under Voice Broadcast, entitled: “No Detection – With Transfer”.

CallFire now gives you the ability to set the number of calls dialed per agent!

How the feature works:

The feature will send out multiple calls for each agent that is logged in. You can control the number of calls that are sent, e.g. 1.2 calls per agent. You are immediately connected to the first call that is picked up.

When to use it:

Lets say your list is an average quality list. These lists usually are 50% effective. If you have a list like this you’ll see that for every 2 numbers that is dialed, only 1 number actually answers.  In order to increase the campaign’s efficiency, the "Calls to Agent Ratio" could be sent to 2. That means for every agent you have signed in, two calls will be dialed. This helps because your agents spend less time listening to Custom Music on Hold  and more time talking to your customers or clients! Of course you’ll need evaluate your own lists before using this feature to ensure you are dialing at the appropriate ratio. Watch those call abandon rates! And just in case you’re stuck with a bad list, CallFire lets you set the ratio anywhere between 1 to 4. It’s just one more feature that makes CallFire easy and effective. What’s the best part? It’s offered at the same low price! There’s no extra charge!

Here is how to do it :