CallFire

by Kimberly Kohatsu

A number of customers have asked how they can use their CallFire phone numbers together with their Google AdWords campaigns. In the video below, I explain two ways to incorporate your call tracking phone numbers. The first is Phone Extensions, which you can read more about here. The second is simply adding the phone number to the Google ad text. Keep in mind if you choose to use a Phone Extension and you enable the “call-only” format, clicking on your ad will not bring the user to your mobile landing page; it will only give them the option to call your business.

If you add the phone number to your ad text, you probably also want to include a phone number on your landing page. This way, if someone clicks on your ad and then wants to call your business, they can.

Questions? Fire away in the comments section.

by Kimberly Kohatsu

“Wake up and get ready for class.”

If you’re a teenager, you might expect to hear this from your mom or dad. But from your principal?

That’s exactly what happened to 500 chronically tardy students at B.M.C. Durfee High School in Fall River, MA.

The goal is to have 95% of students in class before the first bell rings. Last year, Durfee reached 89% attendance, when the goal was set at 92%. Administrators note that they do not rely solely on the automated calls; some go so far as to knock on doors. “We’re looking to get whatever hooks the students,” Ross Thibault, Durfee’s vice principal, told Boston.com.

Durfee is just one of the many schools employing voice broadcast to combat absenteeism. In New York City, a campaign named “WakeUp!NYC” launched last month, where chronically absent students in 25 schools received automated calls from celebrities including Magic Johnson, Jose Reyes, Big Boi, Terrence J and Rosci, and Trey Songz. “To make it big,” Trey Songz warns, “you gotta go to school and get your education, just like I did. It’s the key to a better future, better job, better money, better life.”

“Through WakeUp! NYC we’re putting on a full-court press, using mass media and digital media to drive home the point that every student should be in school every day,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “It’s the next step in our efforts to cut absenteeism and put more students on the road to success, in school and in life.” Early results from the truancy program showed improvements in many participating schools. Elementary schools registered the largest improvement, with a collective 24% decrease in the number of absences. At Isaac Newton Middle School, the drop was nearly 39%. Among high schools, the High School for Teaching and the Professions in the Bronx showed the highest decline of 9%.

WakeUp!NYC is also including a “good news” component, where students will be congratulated by celebrity partners for strong or improved attendance, because research suggests celebrating improved attendance helps further improve attendance.

“We almost caused a stampede when we played the inspirational ‘stay-in-school’ messages from Trey Songz over the loudspeaker,” Camille Jacobs, assistant principal at Pathways College Preparatory School in Saint Albans, NY, said. “My students thought a celebrity was in the building and ran to the office to see him. It really seemed to make an impression on them!”

If you are interested in implementing a similar program for your school, district, or non-profit group, CallFire is an eager and enthusiastic partner. Our Voice Broadcast product makes it simple to upload a message and pre-schedule it to go out to a list of contacts. Call 877-897-FIRE to get started.

by Kimberly Kohatsu

The protests in the Wisconsin state Capitol are now in their second week, and the political dialogue has gone beyond collective bargaining and the state budget. Now, there are calls for the recall of certain Wisconsin lawmakers.

Two national liberal political groups, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and Democracy for America (DFA), used CallFire’s Hosted IVR to send automated calls to 50,000 constituents in five Wisconsin state-senate districts.

Aimee Auer, a New London, WI schoolteacher, recorded the message, and it was uploaded into the CallFire interface. The voter interest poll was then programmed using CallFire’s drag-and-drop IVR Designer. Each keypad input is recorded for reporting, and listeners can be connected directly to their state senators office using a call transfer command. Listen to the result below:

Adam Green, co-founder of PCCC, sums up the strategy in three words: “Offense, offense, offense.” Green revealed to MSNBC that initial results of the calls show 59.7% of Republican voters would support recall efforts if the targeted state senators ultimately support Gov. Scott Walker’s bill, S.B.11. Green was able to see these survey results in real-time through CallFire’s campaign dashboard.

Michael Snook, Director of Targeting and Analytics for PCCC, noted, “CallFire made it possible for us to produce and deploy this effective advocacy campaign—quickly, and on budget. With CallFire’s simple, flexible XML environment, we were able to design a campaign that would connect with thousands of Wisconsin voters to voice their support for working families against Republican class warfare, and offer them the opportunity to connect directly with their elected officials.”

For a recall to be successful, petitioners must gather a number of signatures equal to 25% of the general electorate. If enough signatures are gathered, an election is held, and the official must run for his/her job again.

A conservative group, the American Patriot Recall Coalition, is also testing the waters for recall—except they are hoping to recall seven of the 14 Democratic state senators who fled the capitol in protest of Walker’s bill.

There are currently labor disputes in Ohio, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and even the NFL. Any of these political groups could use CallFire’s intuitive platform for voter outreach and education, volunteer phone banking, and text messaging campaigns. Watch CallFire’s CEO, Dinesh Ravishanker, explain how political campaigns have benefitted from using CallFire.

by Kimberly Kohatsu

We at CallFire often struggle with how to describe what it is that we do. And, as someone fairly new to the company, this is the first question I want a real answer to. What is it? How does it work? Why is it good?

One of the difficulties in describing CallFire is that it offers such a broad array of functions. Businesses use CallFire in completely different ways. Our company tends to describe our suite of products as “cloud telephony,” but that doesn’t seem to clarify much. The best way I’ve been able to describe CallFire is it helps manage big calling tasks. These tasks might be calling a long list of people, or handling a large amount of calls coming in, and routing those calls to the right place. Anything with a phone that might seem daunting, CallFire makes manageable. Are we clearer yet?

Not really. I’m not entirely satisfied with that answer. It seems incomplete—CallFire doesn’t just help businesses manage, it helps businesses grow. It’s a business tool and a marketing tool. For instance, text marketing is becoming a bigger deal. We help businesses do that. We even help businesses retain their customers and build loyalty by enabling them to send automated appointment reminders, or set up customer satisfaction surveys. So now, it’s not really about making businesses more manageable, it’s about making them smarter.

Great. What’s a nice, concise way to convey all that? “CallFire: a really smart way to manage your phone operations that will potentially also help you serve your customers better and get new ones so that you can make more money.” Fit that on a business card, please. Thanks.

I’m still at a loss. So I’m trying out this whole crowdsourcing thing. I’m going to describe some of the ways CallFire is being used, and you guys out there in Internetland tell me how best to encapsulate it.

CallFire in a (Very Large) Nutshell

• Our Cloud Call Center enables businesses to call a lot more people in a lot less time. For instance, political organizations use CallFire for volunteer phone banking, and insurance agents use CallFire to get in touch with their leads. CallFire saves them the hassle of dialing numbers by hand. You simply upload a list (an Excel file or CSV) and the CallFire system dials them for you. It’s even intelligent enough to skip bad phone numbers and busy signals, so it’s just people talking to people. CallFire also has a feature called SmartDrop, where if the agent hears voicemail pick up, they can press a button and leave a pre-recorded message—no waiting for the beep. CallFire also provides call data such as the length and time of each call, and can record each call for quality assurance monitoring.

See, that was a 140-word paragraph to describe one product. There are four more! Woe is me. Alas. Moving on…

• Hosted IVR is our second product. IVR is complicated because we offer both inbound and outbound IVR, and, of course, they do different things. First off, IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response. It’s better described as a virtual receptionist or a phone tree. You know when you call a business, and you hear, ‘press 1 for this and press 2 for that?’ That’s an inbound phone tree. But of course, that begs the question, what’s an outbound phone tree? An outbound phone tree works the opposite way. The business calls you, and then gives you phone menu choices. So a business might use an IVR to conduct a satisfaction survey. Example: “Would you recommend us to your friends? Press 1 for yes, 2 for maybe, 3 for no.” Automated phone polls can also collect RSVPs for an event, ask about new product offerings, or get other feedback.

Um… any ideas for that big umbrella phrase to encapsulate all this yet? All right then. Here’s the next product.

• Call Tracking is generally used in marketing campaigns. Let’s say you’re a real estate agent. You get one of those bus benches with your picture on it, and you put an ad in the local paper. With call tracking, if you put one phone number on the bench and a different number in the paper, you can gauge how many people are calling as a result of the bench versus the print ad. Is either one worth the cost? Call Tracking will help you know.

Pretty clear, right? Maybe? Hopefully? No? Next…

• Voice Broadcast is when you record a message and then send that message to a whole bunch of people. It happens a lot during election season. Last November, for instance, I got a call that Susan Sarandon had recorded, encouraging me to vote yes on Prop 19, California’s “pot amendment.” 
Voice Broadcast is often confused with Outbound IVR. They are very similar, but if Susan Sarandon were to say something at the end of that recorded message like, “Press 1 if you’d like to donate to support Prop 19, or 2 to be connected to your representative’s office,” that’s an Outbound IVR. The IVR would then connect the call to a live person who could take the donation information or forward the call on to my Congressman’s office. Voice Broadcast, on the other hand, would be more appropriate if the message was all you needed to convey, without any further action. It’s often used for emergency notifications, like announcing school cancellations. Oh, to get even more confusing, if you only have one key-press that will forward the call on somewhere, the Voice Broadcast campaign can handle that. But if it’s any more than that, you’re in IVR territory. I know. Sorry.

Are we there yet? Almost. Finally, we have our newest product (drum roll)…

• SMS Broadcast. These messages work much like Voice Broadcast, except instead of a recorded voice message, it’s a text message. It’s a cool marketing vehicle for exclusive discounts or time-sensitive alerts such as, “It’s the last day to get free shipping in time for Valentine’s Day.” The SMS broadcast can also include a hyperlink to connect smartphones to the business’s website. Other applications for text messages include appointment reminders or confirmations, medication reminders, and traffic alerts.

Okay, so that’s a brief (brief?) overview of our products. So now that we’ve gone through the basics, how would you describe what it is that we do, and more importantly, what we help businesses do?

We at CallFire are all ears.

by Natalia Klishina

Earlier this year Thomas Friedman published a column in The New York Times titled “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” In it, he argued that what America needs is more funding for start-ups and less bailouts for old, floundering enterprises. Why? Because the former, not the latter, are America’s future. Friedman quoted Robert Litan of the Kauffman Foundation, who said, “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less… That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.” Clearly, a large part of new jobs are in start-ups — which means that there is plenty of room for smart, innovative risk-takers in this market. If you need more proof, just take a look at this TMCnet article about IT job gains. According to the latest IT Employment Index from IT trade group TechServe Alliance, there were more than 10,000 new IT jobs in the month of October, reaching a total of 3,903,000. This is a 2.2% gain from the previous year, compared to a 0.6% total growth in the non-farm sector.

What does this have to do with CallFire? Well, CallFire is one of the companies contributing to this trend, growing aggressively in a market that seems to be stagnant. We have grown by 1076% between 2006 and 2009 and expanded our staff by nearly 30% in the last quarter alone — and we don’t plan to slow down.

Of course, we’re not hiring just anyone; in a small company, hiring the brightest talent is more important than ever. Just look at our new Marketing Director Kim Kohatsu, whose goal is to “develop the brand into something meaningful and indispensable to our customers.” And she is definitely more than ready to take on her role as our brand ambassador: Kim graduated as one of the top 12 Syracuse University Scholars with undergraduate degrees in Advertising, Political Science, and French; she then went on to receive a Masters of Science in Communication from VCU Brandcenter — the leading advertising program in the nation; she has won numerous regional, national, and even international advertising awards; she has worked for clients such as the California Avocado Commission, AAA, the Hilton Family of Hotels, American Career College, Goodwill, Pioneer, Yamaha, TollFreeForwarding.com, and many others. It’s people like her who have helped this company grow so quickly in the past, and that will propel it to become even bigger and more successful in the future.

So if you’re an ambitious, innovative thinker who wants to be part of such a quickly-growing company, join us. We’re currently looking for an API Developer/Engineer to help us develop our API’s and act as a bridge with third-party developers.

The CallFire team is looking forward to the third annual Digital Family Reunion holiday party tomorrow! We’ve mostly been going to tech start-up events lately, so it’ll definitely be exciting to network with hundreds of people in all sort of industries — from media, to finance, to education. Digital Family has put together a great way for business and technology professionals to expand their connections in Southern California and “to make a positive impact both locally and globally.” We can’t wait to meet everyone at the party and see what sorts of great ideas we can come up with for 2011 and beyond.

Event info:
Wednesday, Dec. 8 at 6-11pm
Wokcano (1413 5th St., Santa Monica — walking distance from our office)

CallFire is actually doing something really cool for this event! Instead of sponsoring a showcase table, we’re offering to send out an SMS Blast to participants shortly before the event, with Google Maps directions and venue information — both as a reminder and as a resource. We thought it would be a great way of showcasing something very simple that you can set up in just a few moments with CallFire SMS Broadcasting. Keep us in mind for the next time you’re hosting an event!

It’s great to see Coloft on the list of sponsors again. Last time we saw them was for the TechZulu Spotlight: LA Tech event at UCLA we went to last month. Names and faces get very familiar in the small world of Los Angeles tech. I’m also hoping to meet some people from WITI — being a woman in technology myself. And speaking of making a positive impact globally, I’m surprised and excited to see Room to Read on the list of sponsors (I thought they were in San Francisco). If you don’t know about Room to Read, you certainly should find out more. It’s an international non-profit organization that works with local communities and organizations in developing countries all around the world to increase literacy rates among children and gender equality in education. If you agree that world change starts with educated children, check out their website and donate!

Last Thursday CallFire’s CEO, Dinesh Ravishanker, and COO, TJ Thinakaran, spoke at UCLA Anderson Business school. The event, which was sponsored by TechZulu and the Entrepreneurship Association at UCLA, was a huge success and networking opportunity.

Natalia and Chathri even gave away 30 prizes to attendees of the event! If you missed the event and want to learn more about how CallFire can help your startup succeed, call 877.897.FIRE to speak to someone on our Solutions team.

This past Saturday, the American Diabetes Association raised over $280,000 at Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes 2010 — and CallFire was there to help.

Members of the CallFire team brought their friends and family along with them for the 5K walk through Universal Studios to help support the nonprofit cause. They even put together a way for other participants to call a into a local number and record their reason for walking that day.

You can listen to what people had to say by going to GeoGraffiti, clicking on any one of the recordings on the left, and then pressing the play button.

Many of you told us you were there to help find a cure and do something positive for the community; others walked for family members — in support of a brother, sister, or parent afflicted by the disease; and then there were those walking for yourselves, proudly stating that you wouldn’t let diabetes hold you back. No matter what your reason, thank you for donating to the cause and for taking the time out of your Saturday to be there.

CallFire hopes to see you again in the future at events like this!

When we first saw the call-to-arms, so to speak, that asked for participants who believed they were transforming their industry with technology and “making the world a greater place to live” — we thought, “Why of course!” That, and the CallFire CEO misses his good old days back at UCLA. Joking aside, though, we think it’s a great idea to bring together new, innovative companies and the brightest minds at Anderson for some demos, Q&A, and, of course, networking over drinks. TechZulu and UCLA have become an integral part of the growing movement to prove to the world that “there’s more than one place in California to create great technology.” We definitely commend them for that and are looking forward to the event!

Official page for the event: Spotlight: La Tech

Date: Thursday, November 18th

Time: 6:30 pm – 9:30 pm

Location: Korn Hall, UCLA Anderson School of Management (110 Westwood Plaza)

It’s not too late to buy tickets! They’ll be available until the 18th, with a special price of $15 until the 15th.

We really hope you’ll take the time to come out to UCLA with us!

This Saturday, November 13th, thousands of people will gather at 9am at the Universal Studios Backlot to help fight diabetes by walking in the 5K (3.1 mile) Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes event — and CallFire team members will be there too!

Don’t miss an opportunity to meet the CallFire team. Just look for us there in these shirts:

It’s also not too late to still join the effort. You can register as an individual or a team by going to the official Step Out website and clicking “create a team” or “register as an individual.” If you don’t have a team, join ours! Just click on “Join a Team,” search for “callfire” in the Team Name field, and click “join” at the bottom right. We’d love to have you!

Already signed up as a team? Want a simple way to remind your team about the event? CallFire can help you send quick, easy messages to your team the day before the walk – either through a voice or SMS blast. Register now and give a quick call to our customer care line at (213) 221-2289 to receive 100 free minutes and enable text messaging. Then, take a few more minutes to create a simple voice or SMS campaign that will send a pre-recorded message to everyone on your team at a specified time. See, quick and easy!

So check out how CallFire can help you organize your team, look for us at Universal on Saturday, and after the event, let us know if you saw us, or how you used CallFire. We always want to hear from you.