We recently published a case study for Tuff Shed, who used CallFire to reach its highest one-day retail sales day in 30 years.
Download the CallFire Case Study.
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.
by Natalia Klishina
Today we sent out an email to our most-active customers from the last 3 years asking them for their feedback. (If you didn’t receive the email, you can always access the form here.) One of the reasons is that we’re including a lot more customer commentary in the revision of the CallFire site we’re currently working on; and the other is that our team usually doesn’t get to read reviews until a customer takes the initiative to contact us or post online, but we really want to know what our customers think.
We got 20 entries in just the first hour. Here are some highlights that we really enjoyed reading and will be sure to include on our new site.
Last night, about 30 startup entrepreneurs visited CallFire HQ for Poker Startups, a monthly invitation-only poker night and networking opportunity for tech founders and employees, execs, and investors. The stakes are kept low “in deference to the bootstrapping startups,” but pride is a hefty price to pay.
Some of the represented companies included ShareSquare, a QR code company, NextSpace, a local co-working space, Kuzic, an online music licensing startup, and Extra Lunch Money, which… well… let’s just say it’s an adult-themed venture.
There were three games of no-limit Texas Hold’Em with blinds increasing every ten minutes. Only two members of team CallFire sat in on the games, and it just so happens they were both girls: Lezlie, our superstar accountant, and yours truly. In fact, Lezlie and I were the only two girls at the whole event, which just means we need more female tech entrepreneurs to step up to the tables!
But not to worry. Lezlie and I represented our gender honorably. Early in the game, I hit a full house three separate times, taking a sizeable portion of the pot. Lezlie opted to slow play, strategically folding good hands to let the other players at the table knock each other out. In the end, Lezlie’s strategy paid off. I was all in with two-pair, and got knocked out by Alex Chen’s flush on the river. There were only three people left at that point, and that’s when Lezlie went in for the kill. In the end, she won heads-up play against Romy Maxwell of ShareSquare.
It was a great night of networking, ping pong, and poker, and we hope to host more get-togethers at CallFire for the Santa Monica tech community. Thanks to Rohit Jain and Phil Yang for organizing, and to all the sponsors who furnished prizes and pizzas. Most of all, thanks to Dinesh, CallFire’s fearless CEO for the beer run. And congratulations, Lezlie! You truly earned the Poker Pro badge, designed by CallFire’s own Natalia Klishina.
by Natalia Klishina
Last Friday, CallFire helped sponsor Philanthro Connect 2011– a great invitation-only event put on by Philanthro Productions in order to connect emerging technology companies with the non-profit community. Since we work with hundreds of non-profits, we were interested in the idea as soon as we heard about, and we’re glad we had the chance to make the event possible (as well as attend it). We even roped our CEO, Dinesh Ravishanker, into booth duty. 
That’s him on the left holding up our awesome “I SHAPE DEMOCRACY” T-shirts. There were some great companies there with wonderful ideas, and we really enjoyed meeting them. Here’s 2 of my personal favorites:
ONEHOPE Wines is definitely one of my favorite discoveries of all time, because 1) I love wine, and 2) I love good causes. ONEHOPE combines the two by partnering with winemaker Rob Mondavi, Jr. to resell his award-winning wines under the ONEHOPE label and donate 50% of their profits to charity. Each type of wine stand for a different cause: Chardonnay for Breast Cancer, Merlot for AIDS, Cabarnet for Autism, Sauvignon Blanc for the Environment, Zinfandel for Supporting the Troops, and Pinot Noir for Children’s Hospitals. Here is an excerpt from their Vision:
“Now when people gather and drink wine, they can talk about vintage, appellation and the cause on the label. Putting ONEHOPE Wines on shelves and in restaurants across the country keeps causes in front of consumers year round. Moving forward, the ONEHOPE brand will grow to include other causes, and eventually other products. We’ve been laughed at, and called crazy for giving away half of our profits, but why wait until we’re old to do it? Why not make money and give at the same time? It makes perfect sense to us. It’s true that we’re young, and idealistic. Some even suggest we’re naive, but the positive impact on people’s lives and results don’t lie. To put it into perspective, if just one in four, out of the estimated 19.5 million women who are or will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the U.S. received one bottle of our ONEHOPE Chardonnay every month for one year, ONEHOPE Wine could raise $70 million dollars for breast cancer research.”
I was definitely inspired and promptly ordered a bottle of Zin on the spot. I also might have at times been mistaken for an employee since their booth was right next to CallFire’s and I couldn’t stop talking about it to passerby.
Roozt has a great idea and also some great reps with creative marketing ideas, which you might be able to infer from the photo of 2 of them on the right. Yes, those are chicken hats they’re wearing. They were asking people to put them on and take photos to enter a photo contest to win credit on their site. They were also serving shots, which just might have encourage people to put on funky hats and take silly photos in them.
As for what Roozt does, they apply the Groupon limited-time and limited-quantity discount deal to the world of good causes:
“Roozt helps ethical shoppers discover and save on socially responsible brands that make a positive influence on the world.
We give consumers up to 80% off retail price of our featured products, exclusively socially responsible companies… By doing positive things for their communities, their employees, the environment, or humanity as a whole, Roozt brands allow customers to feel confident that their purchase not only gets them an awesome product, but is also helping to make the working a better place.”
It’s a great way to discover new companies and products that are more than just about profits.
There were definitely a lot of other awesome companies at Philanthro Connect, but there are just the 2 that stuck in my mind the most and that I really wanted to share with our readers. Hopefully, you’ll like them as much as I did.
If you’re a non-profit interested in working with us, shoot us an email at sales@callfire.com or call our sales line at 877-897-FIRE and ask about our non-profit pricing.
Last April I wrote about Marketing your Business, and Yourself, through Events. This week is a shining example of how the CallFire team is doing just that.
Last night, CallFire hosted a networking mixer called Wine++ at a wine bar down the street called Pourtal. The genesis of the Wine++ idea occurred by happenstance; Dinesh, Chathri, and Natalia were having a drink after work at another bar. Pourtal, taking advantage of social media, tweeted at one of them to come down. So they did. Once there, they met the great staff, got to talking, loved the Enomatic wine tasting machines, and thought, techies like us (or winos like us, you pick) would love this.
So we started planning. We enlisted Code for America as our charity of choice, so that 15% of tasting proceeds would go to help technologists working in the public sector. We outreached to our friends (at another networking event, no less) at upStartLA, who generously sponsored tasting cards for the first guests to arrive. And then we spread the word and waited to see what would happen.
Well, the Wine++ mixer went swimmingly. People from the tech community gathered, ate, drank, and had a great time. We heard people say it was nice to see new faces, try out a new place, and that the networking was valuable. They got to learn more about CallFire, and put faces to names if they were already somewhat familiar with us through Twitter, Facebook, or Namesake.
But the week isn’t over yet. Tomorrow night, we’re headed to Caltech in support of Spotlight:LA Tech put on by our friends at TechZulu. New tech startups will demo their products in front of local businesspeople and students. Dinesh is sitting on the judge’s panel, and will present the winner two tickets to our upcoming conference, Biz2Beach.
Then, on Friday, we’re sponsoring Philanthro’s Connect 2011, an event at the intersection of technology and non-profits. We’ll be showing how CallFire has helped hundreds of non-profits with phone banking, volunteer organization, get-out-the-vote efforts, and fundraising. Attendees will have the opportunity to text to donate to Doctors without Borders, and hear a bit about how CallFire has powered campaigns for MoveOn.org, No on Prop 8, and many more.
Events are certainly keeping us busy at CallFire, but it’s the best kind of busy. Meeting, connecting, learning, and sharing is a proud part of our company culture, and our calendars are a testament to that.
Last Thursday, our lead IVR designer Bill Hughes, ran an informative webinar on TMCNet. TMC stands for Technology Marketing Communications, and touts itself as the world’s largest communications and technology community.
Bill began the webinar by introducing CallFire. But some attendees got an early taste of what we do because they opted in to receive text message reminders 10 minutes before the webinar began. Bill explained how CallFire’s enterprise clients work with a whole Professional Services Team at CallFire, consisting of (at a minimum) a developer, engineer, and account manager.
He then elaborated on what exactly an IVR is, and what it can do. IVR applications include playing pre-recorded sound files, reading text-to-speech entries, asking questions and getting back responses, sending responses to a server and getting back other information in response, recording audio data, transferring and routing calls, and more.
So if a business knows it needs an IVR, why, then, a hosted IVR, rather than an on-premise system? Bill discussed the economies of scale associated with Hosted (or Cloud) IVR, and emphasized one feature unique to CallFire: all data can remain secure on your company’s own servers. Only the processes by which that data is gathered resides in the cloud.
Security, it seems, is a huge priority when it comes to cloud deployments. During the webinar, we took a poll of attendees, and security was of high concern. But costs were foremost in attendees’ minds, and a hosted solution wins there too. With a hosted IVR, there is no hardware or special equipment required, and the maintenance and upkeep of the system is the burden of the provider. If you do have data uploaded to the cloud, then the vendor maintains off-site archives, so there’s no need to invest in expensive backup schemes, software, or hardware.
But all of these concerns seem rather abstract without seeing how CallFire has served large-scale clients in the real world. So we took a look at four case studies from CallFire’s 37,000+ user base.
The first was in the political realm, and CallFire has almost too many examples to name. CallFire’s Hosted IVR has served national, state, and local campaigns on both sides of the ideological spectrum by sending out automated surveys, get-out-the-vote reminders, and meet-the-candidate calls.
The next example was a large investment company. Here, the firm needed to collect votes from its shareholders. But every shareholder was unique, needing to vote on issues or directors for funds that he or she was invested in. So CallFire built an IVR to handle voting needs based on a shareholder’s voter reference number. This kept sensitive information secure, while allowing an easy method for shareholders to cast votes on their funds.
The third example is Ipsos Loyalty, for which CallFire has helped process customer satisfaction surveys over seven million times over. CallFire’s IVR was intelligent enough to randomize the order of questions in order to keep the statistical validity. But it also only asked questions based on departments that the survey-taker had actually visited while in-store. Before Ipsos partnered with CallFire, their survey ran to over 7,000 lines of code in the back-end. Once CallFire was done, it was down to 1,000 lines of code, greatly increasing the efficiency of the script.
Finally, Bill discussed United Road Service, an auto delivery service company for Honda. Like many enterprise clients, United needed verbal confirmation for insurance and legal purposes. This is another area where a Cloud IVR shines. Using CallFire, United Road Service drivers could call into the IVR, enter his driver code, and confirm his verbal statement that his delivery was made and his truck was returned to driveable position. CallFire delivered each recording to United Road Service via its API, and in the event of an accident, the driver, United, and the insurance company were all legally covered. Since United implemented this call-in system, accidents are down over 75%, and Honda has named the United Road Service IVR a Best Practice.
The webinar will be archived on TMCNet for the next 18 months. Just fill out the form and view the entire video with Q&A. For more IVR resources, you can also visit our IVR Designer interactive tutorial, view our weekly IVR webinar, or flip through the slideshow embedded below.
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 MentoringEffective marketing is pretty simple:
- Put your message in front of as many people as possible
- Build lists of prospects that are interested in you, your product, and/or your expertise
- Reach out to the lists regularly with timely, effective, problem-solving information
- Reach out to as many people as possible on days that are important to them
- 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:
- Don’t send out information that has no real value to the prospect
- 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.
Today, CallFire released a new feature which enables you to search for phone numbers not only by area code, but by local rate center, otherwise known as local exchange. For anyone unfamiliar with this industry term, the exchange is basically the first three digits in a phone number after the area code. A rate center is a determined geographic area used by local exchange carriers to set rate boundaries for billing and issuing phone numbers. Typically, a call within a rate center is a local call, while a call from one rate center to another may be considered long distance.
For this reason, CallFire clients have requested the ability to search available phone numbers, not only by area code, but by area code and local exchange. And now they can.
Simply log in to your CallFire admin account, and under “Numbers” choose “Buy Toll-Free or Local.”
You’ll notice a new button that says “Search for numbers local to…” When you hit that button, you’ll see this:
You can then input not only a requested area code, but a local exchange. For example:
It should be noted that you may see results that do not match the digits you inputted. For example, when I inputted 310 area code with 468 exchange, I was served a list of 424 area code phone numbers with the 999 exchange.
This simply means that these phone numbers are, in fact, within the same local rate center as the one you requested. If you want the exact digits, simply hit “Show more numbers” to see if there are any more numbers available that more closely match the numbers you inputted. In this case, there are.
For more information on CallFire phone numbers, please visit this previous post: Exactly how do CallFire phone numbers work?
Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, CallFire holds webinars to introduce new customers to our products, and to familiarize them with their accounts. It’s a live demonstration with audio and video, that allows participants to ask questions and to see the CallFire interface in action.
But now, if those dates and times don’t work for you, you can view an archived webinar at any time. Many thanks to Ryan Koven and Bill Hughes who continually lend their expertise to educate our clients.
Watch now:
(regularly Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11AM PST)
(regularly Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon PST)
(regularly Wednesdays at 11AM PST)
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