CallFire

by Kimberly Kohatsu

Last year, according to WorldatWork, about 26.2 million people, or nearly 20% of the adult working population, worked from home or from a remote location at least once a month. These “remote locations” included satellite centers, hotels, and while on vacation. But if you’re like me, tethered to your smartphone and laptop at almost all times, that number actually seems pretty low.

Regardless, teleworking and flexible work schedules are becoming mainstream benefits. The ability to perform work remotely is an effective tool “in attracting younger employees who appreciate greater flexibility and to recruite remote workers from a wider talent pool,” Susan Bergman of The Society for Human Resource Management recently told Mashable. And it’s not just the Gen Y’s and millenials who are looking for work flexibility. “It’s attractive to busy parents, workers nearing retirement and workers in metro areas where commuting is very time consuming,” Bergman said.

CallFire, being headquartered in Los Angeles, certainly fits that last category. Last month, the US Census reported that LA commuters on average spend 28.1 minutes getting to work (another number that may seem surprisingly low). But if my fuzzy math is correct, that still means that each year, we spend more time commuting than we do on vacation. Talk about lost productivity. Which brings me to my next point: teleworking is not just attractive to employees, but employers as well.

Employees who telework are generally more productive and report greater job satisfaction, due in large part to advances in technology which give them the same access to information as office-based workers. Intranet sites and shared servers mean employees can focus on work without the distractions of meetings, casual conversations, office politics, and other interruptions which, over time, can prove stressful and infringe upon their work-life balance.

CallFire’s Cloud Call Center is, for many sales teams, another tool in the arsenal that allows employees to work remotely. All a sales agent needs is an internet connection and a telephone. The customer’s data and call outcomes are stored securely on the cloud. CallFire also provides the tools to monitor the employee’s phone activities while on the job.

Last February, I wrote about how Citibank was able to retain 700 of its workers despite closing its physical call center in Albuquerque, by leveraging the power of telework. A month later, Allstate Insurance also closed its Albuquerque claims call center. But because of advanced technology, the adjusters can be supervised out of Phoenix.

More and more, teleworking is being driven by necessity. Angela Baron, an advisor to the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said “whilst technology has enabled remote working, it is more the demands of business that is driving it.” This means that not only do work-at-home employees need the ability to work independently and to self-motivate, but that managers need to develop the ability to manage remotely. Crucial to the task, says Baron, are the “communication skills to keep remote workers connected to the team and ensure adequate knowledge exchange and alignment to team and organizational aims and objectives.”

That’s a fancy way of saying managers must facilitate an environment where, even if you’re working from home, you still feel like you’re part of a company. You’re by yourself, but you’re not alone.

via

Dr. Billy Williams mentors clients, especially insurance agents, across the country. He has been a fierce advocate of using CallFire’s Voice Broadcast, Cloud Call Center, and Hosted IVR campaigns for lead prospecting and customer outreach and retention. The following post is a guest blog with some of the tips he has shared with business professionals.

Why Automated Dialing Should be a Marketing Tool All Businesses Use

By Billy R. Williams, Ph.D., President – Inspire a Nation Business Mentoring

Effective marketing is pretty simple:

1. Put your message in front of as many people as possible
2. Build lists of prospects that are interested in you, your product, and/or your expertise
3. Reach out to the lists regularly with timely, effective, problem-solving information
4. Reach out to as many people as possible on days that are important to them
5. Use affordable automation to help you stay consistent with your keep-in-touch campaigns

My partner agencies and the majority of our member agents use a company called CallFire for automated marketing, so I will use their functionality to explain how to target each of the 5 marketing areas I mentioned above.

1. Put your message in front of as many people as possible

• We use the Cloud Call Center to prospect DNC-scrubbed lists of prospects. You can have 1 or 100’s of telemarketers ready to speak live with a prospect.
• We use voice broadcasting to communicate important, non-solicitation, focused messages and announcements to current customers and opt-in prospects
• We also use “Press-1” campaigns to help us accomplish number two on our marketing list:

2. Build lists of prospects that are interested in you, your product, and/or your expertise

• Direct a press-1 campaign to a live person or to a CallFire IVR (message tree, automated survey, or hotline) that can be used to gather or give important information
• Every time someone responds positively to your telemarketer, or presses 1 on your voice broadcast campaign, that is one more person that you just added to your opt-in lists of potential customers

3. Reach out to the lists regularly with timely, effective, problem-solving information

• CallFire gives you the ability to easily schedule follow-up campaigns from calls that were not answered, requested a callback, needed bi-lingual help, etc.

4. Reach out to as many people as possible on days that are important to them

• We create weekly phonebooks in CallFire (Yes, 52 phone books) and each week we run a birthday audit from our database and add the phone numbers into the correct phone book. Then we quickly send out a Voice Broadcast birthday message. We do the same thing for recurring events like upcoming policy reviews, graduations, wedding anniversaries, etc.

5. Use affordable automation to help you stay consistent with your keep-in-touch campaigns

• The more a person hears your consistent message, the more credible you become. By using a low-cost solution like an automated dialer program, you are able to keep a consistent keep-in-touch program operating. You will not benefit long-term from a flash-in-the-pan marketing campaign. Here are my two rules of thumb when it comes to keep-in-touch programs:

1. Don’t send out information that has no real value to the prospect
2. The first time they hear you or your message is an introduction; the second time they can say they know of you; the third time they start to become familiar with you, but it takes four or more times for the prospect to feel like they are developing a relationship with you.

Follow the tips that I have just provided to you when setting up your automated dialer campaigns and you will see an awesome ROI.

Billy Williams, Ph.D., is president of Inspire a Nation Business Mentoring and Williams Family Agency Inc. The group currently has 23 member agencies and produces $360 Million in production annually. He is an expert at helping insurance agents and agencies double or triple their current production using no-cost conversations and processes, low-cost, efficient, marketing and advertising platforms, and technology.

CallFire is hosting a Do-It-Yourself Mortgage & Insurance lead-generation webinar series for mortgage and insurance companies interested in generating leads and increasing revenue on November 23rd & 24th. Both the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions will begin at 11:00am PST. One of CallFire’s experienced mortgage & insurance consultants will show participants how to use Cloud Call Centers, Power Dialing, and Voice and SMS Broadcasts to broaden their reach quickly and simply. Both business owners and agents are encouraged to join in and learn new ways to increase revenue and efficiency.

The first session, held at 11:00am PST, will cover how to use Cloud Call Centers and Power Dialing. This includes instructions on how to create an easy-to-use virtual call center that will quickly connect agents to customers, how to upload an Excel list of existing and potential customers, and how to monitor agents and reach percentages.

The second Tuesday session, held at 12:00pm PST, will cover how to use Voice and SMS Broadcasts to communicate important messages to existing customers and provide an easy way for them to respond. This includes instructions on how to create an effective recorded message for a voice broadcast campaign, how to upload an Excel list of existing and potential customers, and how to create an option for customers to call back with a simple press of a button.

Wednesday sessions will follow the same format.

To sign up, e-mail sales@callfire.com with “DIY Mortgage & Insurance” or “Webinar” in the subject field, or sign in on our Webinar page on the day of, right before the webinar begins. Feel free to include any questions you want answered during the webinar in your e-mail. For more information, please call 877.897.FIRE.

Hi Everyone!

My name is Tina and If you use CallFire then you may have participated in my Webinar.    I get a lot of calls about “best practices” for using CallFire’s Virtual Call Center, Voice Broadcast & various Cloud Telephony tools for outbound call center sales.   Here they are:

Outbound Call Center Sales Tips:

1. Creativity is important
   Phone interactions are impersonal, so be sure to smile in the message.    Feel free to use humor, wit & charisma to engage your potential customer over the phone.   Building trust & relationships is key to making sales.
2. Use fresh data & scrubbed lists
   Generating leads & sales can only be accomplished if you have a great list to call.   Existing customer databases, InfoUSA business listings, and online lead-gen are great sources for high-quality data.
3. Use a woman’s touch
   Try using a woman’s voice for your recordings.   Many DIY’ers use their own voice to save a few bucks.  Check out services like Voice123.com to get a professionally recorded greetings.  Your target demographic may react differently to voices of varying gender.  Try to diversify every aspect of your outbound effort!
4. Communicate with your customers
   We all get wrapped up in our amazing sales vision, but don’t forget to ask your customers what matters to them.  For example, you might want to figure out what time of day each of your customers prefer to receive telephone updates & callbacks.  Use this data to schedule your campaigns accordingly.
5. Try Call Tracking & Text-To-Speech
   A balanced outbound sales effort strives to track it’s efficacy over time.   Call Tracking & Hosted IVRs are a great way to track your marketing efforts, at the campaign level!  If you haven’t checked out advanced voice services, give us a call, or watch this video to learn more.

Thanks everyone!  ~Tina

Cloud telephony platforms can help your business generate inbound sales calls.  Here’s a few different ways our customers are making their sales lines ring, using VoIP.

Use Toll Free numbers to reveal ads that drive the most sales calls
Say you have 100 different online advertisements but aren’t sure which impressions eventually turn into phone calls.   Use call tracking to purchase 100 phone numbers for each ad-campaign (each number simply forwards to your sales line).  As the calls come in, you can easily visualize which ads are driving the most sales calls.  These advanced reports can be used to further strengthen your ad-campaign.

Use a hosted predictive dialer to free up salespeople’s time
Automate the way your agents make outbound calls and save hundreds of hours every month.   By using a hosted predictive dialer and your existing telephone system, your agents can fly through 100’s of calls every hour.  Agents can take lives calls immediately, and if they get an answering machine they can click a button to leave a prerecorded message, allowing them to move on to the next LIVE call.

Voice blast your PBX’s missed/abandoned list
Call centers occasionally get overloaded and you may have customers who (for whatever reason) hang up while waiting.   Don’t let these leads go to waste.  Export them to create an automated, press-1 voice broadcast.   Example: “This is an automated callback from ABC Inc. We are sorry nobody was available to take your call.  Please press 1 now, to speak with a sales agent.  He or She will be with you shortly.  Thank you.”   This automation ensures that customers get a follow up & further strengthens your customer service offering.

Add “Click-To-Call” to your website
The idea is simple – add another way for a customer to call you.  By adding a click-to-call option to your website , users can enter a phone number and in moments they can receive a live call from one of your sales agents.  How does it work?  After your lead submits their phone number in the “click to call” form, your sales agent receives a call that says “Press-1 now to speak to connect to a new lead.”   In moments both parties are connected and your sales team does the rest.

Create a unique phone experience using Text-To-Speech
Your client may appreciate an automated phone call that can read them their: account balance, schedules & timings for events, and even driving directions.  Developers can try using VoiceXML to send phone calls that can create a unique experience for users while reducing the volume of trivial phone inquiries your agents must field.

Have you used VoIP in other interesting ways?   Tell us how, using info@callfire.com.  Your story, and links to your business, could end up on the CallFire blog.   ~DR

FAQ: “So what can CallFire do for a B2B sales Agent like me?”
It’s pretty simple actually – you can use CallFire to organize your call-campaign & do the outbound dialing for you.   The website allows you to upload a list of contacts & quickly log into a Virtual Call Center campaign.   Here’s how it works:

1. Agents hear hold music as the dialer displays “Calling” and the numbers it’s attempting to dial.
2. When connected, the hold music goes away & agents hear the recipient say “Hello” without any delay in sound.
3. Agents can then begin the pitch.  CallFire lets you easily take notes, enter a disposition for the call & after wrap-up users can click “Next Call” to get to their next live lead.
4. To leave a recorded message for a machine, simply press the “Answering Machine & Next Call” button, and CallFire will wait for the beep to begin playing your pre-recorded message at the right time, while you take the next live call.

The bottom line for At-home agents & Small Businesses:

1. Spend your time talking to live people & generate good leads.
2. No more hand-dialing hundreds of numbers daily.
3. Don’t deal with busy signals, bad phone numbers & indefinite ringing.
4. Organize your leads & outbound call campaigns.
5. Never let a lead slip through the cracks.
6. Let our system leave the messages on the answering machines.
7. Easily create follow-up campaigns based on your previous call status.
8. Pay-as-you go, starting at only $2.10/hour.

Not sure if CallFire will help you save time & increase customer communication & generate leads?
Call 877.897.FIRE to schedule a free webinar.  We’ll even throw in 100 free minutes so you can try us out.