CallFire

In order to use CallFire legally, some customers (specifically, opt-in telemarketers) may need to obtain a SAN (Subscription Account Number) from the Federal Trade Commission. Here’s how.

TO REGISTER FOR A SUBSCRIPTION ACCOUNT NUMBER (SAN):

1. Click here:  https://telemarketing.donotcall.gov/profile/create.aspx
2. Complete all information with RED asterisks *.
3. Click – Organization Function- must check TM/SP (TM/telemarketer) with Independent Access
4. Click on “Submit” box at bottom of page.
5. Click on “Create Profile” box at bottom of page.
6. Click on “Certify” box at bottom of page.
7. PRINT THIS PAGE OF I.D.’s AND PASSWORDS FOR YOUR RECORDS.
8. Click on “Subscribe and Pay” box (you only need to pay if you select more than 5 area codes to prospect in)
9. Enter your 5 free selected area codes in which you will be prospecting
10. PRINT THIS PAGE OF SAN AND AREA CODES!

For help selecting appropriate area codes to dial, please refer to: http://www.nanpa.com.
Happy dialing!  ~DR

Most CallFire.com users are not required to access the National Do Not Call Registry, and thus may access CallFire.com as an Exempt Organization, if one or more of the following is true:

1. Your organization is not subject to either the FTC’s or the FCC’s jurisdiction. For example, a non-profit charitable organization may be an Exempt Organization, assuming, of course, that it is truly a non-profit. Entities that have been granted tax exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code are not necessarily Exempt Organizations for purposes of the National Do Not Call Registry. See, e.g., FTC v. National Consumer Council, Inc., and FTC v. Debt Management Foundation Services, Inc. There, the FTC successfully challenged the status of a purported nonprofit organization whose role in fact was simply to generate leads for other firms which then charged consumers thousands of dollars in fees for their services.
2. Your organization does not engage in any “telemarketing” or “telephone solicitation” activities, as defined by the FTC and FCC, respectively. For example, survey calls and political polling calls are not covered by the definition of “telemarketing” or “telephone solicitations.” An organization that places ONLY these types of calls may be an Exempt Organization.
3. Your organization qualifies for one or more of the specific exemptions contained in the FTC’s and FCC’s rules, such as:
   a. you only call to solicit charitable contributions; or
   b. you only call consumers with whom you have an established business relationship; or
   c. you only call consumers from whom you have received written permission to call; or
   d. you only make business-to-business calls.

If you are a for-profit telemarketer, you are NOT an Exempt Organization.

Whether your organization is exempt is a decision that requires an understanding of the FTC’s and FCC’s requirements, as well as your specific business practices. Therefore, whether you should subscribe as an Exempt Organization is a decision you must make. In making this decision, you may wish to consult with an attorney.

You may wish to consider the following materials when deciding whether to subscribe to the National Do Not Call Registry as an Exempt Organization:

• The FTC Act at 15 U.S.C. §§ 41-58 and related case law.
• The Communications Act at 47 U.S.C. §§ 151-757 and related case law.
• The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) at 47 USC §227 and related case law.
• The Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud Abuse Prevention Act at 15 U.S.C. §§ 6101-6108.
• The Do Not Call Implementation Act at P.L.108-10, 117 Stat. 557, and related case law.
• The Telemarketing Sales Rule at 16 C.F.R. § 310 and related Agency statements and case law.
• The FCC’s rules implementing the TCPA at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200 and related Agency statements.

CallFire.com has released a new feature that allows you to limit the amount of simultaneous call transfers that your agents receive.  You asked for it, and now it’s here.  Once your agents are busy, CallFire will stop sending out new broadcasts until one or more of your agents are off the phone.

The request:
“My office has 5 agents and we’re sending our a broadcast to our business associates… but when a lot of people transfer at the same time, my agents get overloaded!   How can I make sure that my agents don’t get too many transfers at once?”

The solution:
Step 1: Create your campaign. After doing so, check the checkbox to the left of the Campaign that you’d like to modify. Select “Edit Campaign Settings” from the My Campaign’s page. Click Go!

Step 2: Move the slider until you have your agent count.
(This numeric represents the total number of simultaneous transfers allowed for that campaign.)

Enjoy, DR

We get a lot of calls from our clients asking for secrets of a successful campaign. This, as it turns out, is a loaded question as so much depends on the purpose of the campaign as well as the end audience. However for discussion purposes we’ll narrow it down to traditional lead generation campaigns.

Note: As you read these, please keep in mind that this is not professional marketing advice, merely experience based suggestions. People go to school for this stuff, i.e., to deep-dive into marketing, we didn’t.

1. Keep it LEGAL:  Most CallFire customers use us to contact their own customers, businesses, or resell value-add voice services.  All of which is perfectly legal.  However, if you purchase opt-in leads and use them to generate sales - be sure to research and adhere to your local, state, federal, and international dialing laws & regulations.   You may not be eligible to use CallFire if you do not adhere to these dialing laws.  Anyone can check out www.DoNotCall.gov for information on using telephony broadcast within the United States.
2. Keep the Message Short: Keep the message between 20-30 seconds. Most customers have little patience for automated audio and will hang up pretty quickly if they don’t hear something they like.
3. Clear Call to Action: This is especially true for press-1 style campaigns. There should be a call to action early in the message, this can be in the form of a question, or a directive. It also helps if relevant, recent news items are referenced for it brings a certain degree of freshness to the message.
4. Be Emotional: By this we don’t mean theatrics, but at the same time don’t come across sounding like Stephen Hawking (no offence intended). You have a very short window to grab the customer’s ear, do it with emotion, do it with style. If you’re not confident of your voice, you could always try a professional voice talent. Keep in mind however, if reaching out to existing customers with whom you already have a relationship, your voice might get more transfers than even a CNN anchor.

For a more thorough evaluation, check out a previous post titled “Top Five Methods to Make Successful Political Voice Broadcasting“

We would also like to announce the inaugural of our account alerts feature. Account alerts will inform you about specific events that need your immediate attention. This can include events like campaign start and stop, low funds, or bad file uploads.

Currently, the Callfire system will inform you if any numbers you upload to your campaigns have processing errors.

You will get a bold alert as shown above, clicking on messages will take you to your inbox:

Clicking on the unread messages will let you know the message details and will also remove the alert notification from the top of the page. This way, truly urgent events are automatically escalated for your review.

Quote of the day:

Alert: A message or other indication that identifies a problem or an impending problem.

                                                                                                    —IBM’s DB2 Manual

Lately we’ve been churning out features so fast that we’ve not gotten enough time to write about them. However, this one feature is too hard not to sing praises for: Removing duplicates. Now, every time you add numbers to a new or existing campaign, you’ll have the option to remove duplicates from that list. To do so, just choose yes to the question below and you’re done!

If there are any duplicates in your list, they will be marked as such and not dialed. You can still see them by clicking on the campaign details page.

For voice broadcast campaigns, campaign thresholds determine how fast or slow your campaigns run. Each campaign starts with a default threshold of 50 CPM (Calls Per Minute). This is the default account threshold as well. This means that the system will dial fifty numbers every minute that the campaign is running. However, if you have multiple campaigns running, only one will run at 50 CPM, and all other campaigns will run at 1 CPM. If the 50 CPM campaign finishes before the others, the system will intelligently redistribute the threshold, but not until the 50 CPM campaign is over. So, if you need to have all campaigns running in parallel, then you’re better off distributing the threshold manually over your running campaigns. For example, you could have them run in a 10-10-30 or similar combination. The beauty of the CallFire system is that it gives you full control over your campaigns, so you can update the threshold while the campaign is running, and it takes effect immediately!

Note, for those with higher account thresholds, the same logic applies to your account limit. For those who would like a higher threshold, please do drop us a line.

Many of our customers are aware of our Phonebook feature. This feature allows you to have one list of phone numbers that can then be reused for future campaigns. There is a default phonebook created for you that houses your DNC numbers, i.e., numbers that should not be called again. As stated earlier, this list is live. In other words, for any of your voice broadcast campaigns if a user presses the DNC option, or for your Call Center Connect (Virtual Call Center) campaigns you create a ‘DNC’ (case sensitive) disposition, and if your agents choose that option, that number gets added to your DNC phonebook. Now the question arises:

When and how does DNC scrubbing occur?

The answer is only by request. As pointed out by our help page, every time you create a campaign or add numbers to a campaign, you will be given the option to scrub against the the DNC phonebook. Keep in mind that the DNC is a phonebook is a snapshot at any given time. This means a scrub against the DNC at 9:00 AM will not yield the same results as a scrub at 12:00 PM the same day. This may lead you to another question:

I am running multiple campaigns, how can I keep my DNC scrubbing up-to-date?

The answer is again: only by request. Simply select the campaign you want to scrub as shown below:

From the drop down menu on top select “Scrub Campaign” and click go:

The campaign will be scrubbed against all the numbers dialed up until that point.

As the message suggests, please verify the phone numbers before proceeding. One way to do this is to go your call details for that campaign and check for any with the status ’scrubbed’.

I must hasten to point out that this list is your own and in no way or form cross referenced with the Federal DNC. Our clients are responsible for their conformance with federal and local dialing laws. You can read more about dialing laws here.

Press-1 campaigns have been around for a while. Why would our Press-1 campaigns be any different? Because we add a Voice 2.0 twist, of course.

Earlier this year, CallFire released its Voice Broadcast user interface for small to medium enterprises. CallFire is the fastest, easiest way to price-effectively create Press 1 outbound campaigns. CallFire empowers small businesses (previously unable to deploy telephony applications due to expense constraints) to now easily connect warm leads to a sales force, LIVE.

Use CallFire.com today to easily create Press 1 campaigns using our Press 1 API, please visit: http://www.callfire.com/dialer/cm/info/voice_broadcast_api.html. To try out a Press-1 campaign for your business, sign up here.

Cheers, DR

My colleague Adrian and I were lamenting about how the startup life can impede one’s workout schedule. Unlike me, he’s a workout fanatic. Working out in the morning would be a good way to ‘get it done and get it out of your way’. One challenge is consistently getting up in the morning, and that’s when Adrian came up with an idea: Why not use CallFire as a wake-up service?

Think about it, if you scheduled a campaign to give you a call every day of the month at 4:00 AM, it would cost you $1.05. That’s one dollar for the entire month! It’s way cheaper than the $4.99/per month or 7cents/min that dedicated wake-up services charge you. You could even schedule three additional snooze style wake-up calls and still not break the $5 mark!

CallFire: the personal productivity tool. Whowudathunkit!

Quote of the Day:

I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I’m doing.

                                                                                                          -Marsha Doble