Admin/Admin Login – An admin (administrator) is the CallFire account holder. The admin login is where you create and manage all your campaigns, whether they be Voice Broadcast, Cloud Call Center, IVR, buying phone numbers, or SMS.

Agent/Agent Login – An agent is solely for Cloud Call Center campaigns. An agent is a person actively making the outbound calls. You’ll use the agent login to begin dialing on a campaign that was already created by the admin user.

Agent Barge – Agent barge is a quality control measure that allows an admin to barge, or listen in on, calls as they’re being made by the agents.

Agent ID – The agent ID is a number assigned by CallFire each time an agent begins dialing through the Cloud Call Center. Once the agent inputs the correct agent ID, the agent pop-up window with the campaign script will appear, and the system will begin dialing.

Analytics Tag – This advanced IVR function sends a page-view that will be factored in to Google Analytics.

Answering Machine Detection (AMD) – The AMD capability will determine whether the call has been answered by a live person, or by a machine. When AMD is enabled, you can program your campaign to treat live answers and answering machines differently, such as hanging up and moving on the next call or leaving a message.

API – Application Programming Interface. This is coder speak for our software code that allows a developer to integrate other software into CallFire, or to build custom software.

API Key – This is a code that grants a developer access to the CallFire API. You can find your unique API key in your account settings.

Autodialer – The autodialer is what makes the Cloud Call Center so powerful. It does the dialing for you, so there’s no dialing by hand.

Autoresponder/Auto-reply – An autoresponder is a text message that is sent automatically in response to an incoming text.

Call Ratio – This is the ratio of numbers dialed at a time to a single agent. For instance, a 1:1 ratio means that each agent’s autodialer is only dialing one number at a time. A 2:1 ratio means that the autodialer is dialing two numbers at a time, and will connect the agent to the first live answer. A higher calling ratio helps get through a list more efficiently; it decreases time between calls and ups the possibility of connecting to live leads.

Call Transfer – A call transfer is the ability for an agent to forward a call to a supervisor or other party. All he/she has to do is input the 10-digit phone number into the agent interface and the call will be routed accordingly.

CPM – Calls per Minute. This is the rate at which Voice Broadcast calls go out. By default, broadcasts are processed at 50 calls per minute, but this can be adjusted in your campaign dashboard.

CRM – Customer Relationship Management. You can integrate your CallFire campaigns with certain CRM providers, such as SalesForce, using our API.

DID Number – Direct Inward Dial Number. DID Number is basically an industry term for a phone number.

DNC - Do Not Call. There are two different DNC lists: the Federal Do Not Call List, against which you should scrub your list prior to uploading your contacts. Then you also have an internal CallFire DNC list, which allows people you call to unsubscribe from future calls.

DTMF – Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency, also known as touch-tone. DTMF assigns a different touchtone to each key on the telephone keypad, so it can distinguish one keypad input from another.

Get Tag – This IVR command calls any URL or http request from your IVR.

Google Talk Tag - This IVR command will automatically initiate an instant message to your Google account.

Goto Tag – This tells your IVR to go to a certain part of your phone tree. For instance, you might have a sound file that reads, “Press 4 to repeat the options.” Upon pressing 4, the Goto tag would repeat the part of your IVR that you had already programmed.

Goto XML Tag – This advanced IVR command calls the specified URL and executes the returned CallFire XML.

Hangup Tag – The hangup tag tells your IVR to hang up and end the call.

Hosted IVR – A hosted IVR is a phone menu that does not require any hardware or special equipment, such as an on-premises PBX (private branch exchange). It’s hosted because it’s housed in the cloud.

If Tag – This advanced IVR command evaluates a javascript expression and reacts accordingly whether the expression is true or false.

Inbound – A call initiated from someone else, coming in to your line.

IVR - Interactive Voice Response. An IVR is essentially a phone menu, or a phone tree. It’s programmed to react to keypad inputs.

Keyword – For an SMS campaign, a keyword is the word that is texted. For instance, when the Red Cross says, “Text JAPAN to 50555,” JAPAN is the keyword, and 50555 is the short code. Keywords will be available on CallFire SMS campaigns beginning summer 2011.

Key Press – This command tells your IVR what to do once a digit on the telephone keypad is pressed.

Live Answer – A person who answers the phone, as opposed to an answering machine.

Long Code – A 10-digit phone number that can send and receive texts.

MachineSkip - This feature detects answering machines, and filters them out of your Cloud Call Center campaigns. When it detects an answering machine, it will automatically leave a pre-recorded message, so your agent doesn’t have to do a thing. The MachineSkip feature is available on the Standard- and Pro-level campaigns.

Max Transfer Rate – The maximum number of transfers your Voice Broadcast campaign will allow at any given time; when the maximum is reached, the broadcasts will pause until your campaign returns below the maximum.

Outbound – A call initiated by you to one of your contacts.

Passcode – The campaign passcode is the password that the admin assigns to access a Cloud Call Center campaign.

Phonebook – A phonebook is a contact phone list maintained in your CallFire account. Watch this video to learn more about working with phonebooks.

Play Tag – This IVR command plays an assigned sound file or performs text-to-speech.

Press-1 Transfer – During a Voice Broadcast, if a press-1 transfer is enabled, the called person can press 1 and be connected to your business. You can also assign a different keypress to transfer your calls, but the capability is generally referred to as “press-1″ anyway.

Press Menu – This IVR command prompts the caller with several options, for instance, “Press 1 for our address, Press 2 to speak to someone in Sales.” You’ll need at least one “Play” menu to present these options.

Power Dialer – The Power Dialer is what makes CallFire’s Voice Broadcasting capability so powerful. It has the ability to dial thousands of numbers, all at once.

Record Tag – This IVR command records the remainder of the call, or will begin recording with a beep and stop by pressing pound (#). When you record a message using CallFire’s Voice Recording Utility, our IVR is using the Record Tag, in conjunction with the advanced Stash and Get tags. You can see a video demonstration of the Record Tag here.

SAN Number - Subscription Account Number. Telemarketers may need to obtain a SAN from the Federal Trade Commission in order to call consumers legally. Click here to find out how to get a SAN.

SetVar Tag – (Set Variable) This advanced IVR command creates a variable which can be used later.

Short Code – A 5- or 6-digit number that can send and receive texts.

SmartDrop – During a Cloud Call Center campaign, the agent can press the SmartDrop button on the interface, and it will leave a pre-recorded message for the answering machine. The agent does not have to wait for the beep or speak into the voicemail; this allows the agent to move on to the next call.

SMS - Short Message Service. An SMS is a text message.

Stash Tag – This advanced IVR tag stores the varname (variable name) and value in the call details report in your CallFire account. See a video demonstration of the Stash tag here and here.

Subset Campaign - A subset campaign duplicates all the settings of an original campaign, but applies it to just part of a phonebook. For instance, you might want to run a subset campaign to call back the portion of your contact list who did not receive your original message. This video will show you how to set up a subset campaign.

Tag - A tag can refer to an IVR command, such as a play tag or a record tag, but when used by itself, it generally means what’s found on the “My Numbers” page. Tags can be useful to help you keep your phone numbers straight. For instance, if you put one phone number on a magazine ad, and a different phone number on your website, you may want to tag each respective number “magazine” and “website.”

Text-to-Speech (TTS) - The text-to-speech engine allows you to program voice prompts on the fly. For instance, if you wanted your IVR to read an individual’s account number, you would use CallFire’s text-to-speech capability.

Transfer Tag – This IVR command connects the active call to a specified phone number. For instance, a political campaign might use a transfer tag to connect the call to a voter’s congressional office.

Voice Broadcast- Voice Broadcast is a type of CallFire campaign that allows you to send a pre-recorded phone message to your contacts. Learn more about Voice Broadcast here.

VoIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol. VoIP is a kind of technology that allows calls to be connected over the internet. However, CallFire VoIP should not be confused with residential VoIP such as Skype or Vonage; we offer an enterprise-level, redundant, fiber-based platform for better reliability and call quality.

Whisper – A whisper is a short message that will be played before an incoming call is connected. This can help you better serve your incoming calls. For instance, if you have one phone number assigned for real estate properties for sale, and one phone number assigned for people who want to sell their real estate, you can set a whisper that will tell you “This call is regarding properties for sale,” before you greet the caller. You can enable the Whisper feature on your “My Numbers” page in your CallFire account.

White Label Program – CallFire’s White Label Program allows approved vendors to re-sell CallFire products using their own branding. An improved version of the White Label Program will be unveiled in late 2011.

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.

This past weekend, the CallFire team attended Opportunity Green, a conference where leaders and executive in the “green” space collaborated, shared ideas, and discussed sustainable practices.
CallFire was there to share information regarding how call centers can be made more environmentally friendly.

Businesses and organizations can use our Cloud Call Center to hire employees or volunteers that can work out of their homes instead of commuting into a traditional call center, and creating pollution. The conference itself was extremely environmentally friendly, with each attendee receiving a Kor water bottle, and filling stations from Everpure located throughout the conference area. Food served for lunch was organic from Organic to Go and Whole Foods, and all of the plastic was biodegradable. The non-dairy coconut icecream from Coconut Bliss was a highlight of ours!

The green perception of CallFire was well received at the conference, and we made some good industry connections. Organic fair trade chocolate from Sweet Earth and Shaman attracted people to our booth, and the telephone number listed on the plantable seed paper band was an ice breaker into what CallFire does. The number on the paper gave attendees a chance to win an ipod nano. One lucky winner would call the number and find out that they were the winner. The number was one of the toll free numbers that CallFire sells for the Call Tracking/Call Forwarding product. This lead into discussions about CallFire as a whole.

Video: CallFire CEO, Dinesh Ravishanker, briefly discusses the impact of SIP and XMPP standards on CallFire customers and unified voice communications as a whole. Google Voice, Gizmo5, AIM, Grasshopper and others are mentioned within the talk.

Youtube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwxd18fF-Dg

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 6, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — 8×8, Inc. (Nasdaq:EGHT), provider of Internet Protocol (IP) communications solutions for business and residential users, today announced it is providing voice trunking services to cloud telephony solution provider CallFire. CallFire began offering its hosted power-dialing services to small business, call center and enterprise customers over 8×8′s established VoIP network last week.

The agreement between the two companies links 8×8′s enterprise-class SIP trunking service together with CallFire’s cloud telephony platform, currently in use by over 14,000 businesses.

“CallFire and 8×8 are collaborating in order to stay at the forefront of innovation in cloud telephony services,” said CallFire CEO & Co-founder Dinesh Ravishanker. “8×8 has become a critical component of our relentless commitment to increasing voice quality for our customers. We are pleased to say that 8×8′s service quality has been exceptional. Our solutions are not only complementary, but together create a best-of-class service for SMBs and the enterprise.”

Initially a customer of CallFire, 8×8 noted that CallFire’s voice quality could benefit from 8×8′s superior VoIP network. By powering a substantial portion of CallFire’s underlying VoIP network, 8×8 was able to combine its enterprise quality VoIP with CallFire’s innovative Hosted Power Dialing platform, and now uses CallFire’s broadcast services exclusively in its call centers.

“We experienced the features and benefits of the CallFire solution firsthand in our own outbound call center and can attest to the simplicity, affordability and effectiveness of this valuable sales, marketing and customer service tool,” said 8×8 Chairman & CEO Bryan Martin. “8×8 is very pleased to bring a better business voice network to CallFire to provide reliable, high quality digital voice service for CallFire’s cloud telephony solutions. In addition to being a valuable partner, CallFire is also now a valuable customer.”

About 8×8, Inc.

8×8, Inc. (Nasdaq:EGHT) offers voice, video and mobile communications solutions for business and residential customers. These solutions leverage existing broadband Internet connections and cellular networks to deliver advanced features and digital quality phone service at a fraction of the cost of legacy, copper wire alternatives. Businesses of any size, configuration or geographic location can benefit from the cost, performance and operational advantages of VoIP technology. All 8×8 communications solutions carry little or no upfront investment, no maintenance or upgrade fees and no change in user behavior. For additional information, visit www.8×8.com.

About CallFire:

CallFire is an industry leader in cloud telephony services that makes using VoIP simple. CallFire specializes in providing high-availability systems, beautiful user interfaces, furious developer support, and unparalleled customer care. Our products include hosted power dialing for agents, voice broadcast, toll free numbers, call tracking analytics and voice APIs. Our tools help developers, carriers & publishers build useful telephony applications. CallFire is located in Downtown Los Angeles and is comprised of a friendly group of intellectuals with aspirations to revolutionize how companies do business.

CONTACT: 8x8, Inc.
         Joan Citelli
         (408) 687-4320
         jcitelli@8x8.com

         CallFire.com
         Rebecca Siegel
         (213) 221-2218
         becky@callfire.com

[originally published by globenewswire.com]

Twiistup holds an annual conference that connects people from tech, entertainment & media. In two days of events, there will be presentations from various start ups to demonstrate their products for investors & media. Twiistup also hosts a series of educational seminars on topics like online video, leveraging the social web, and more!

Check out the impressive list of attendees here: 101 people you’ll meet at twiistup.

CallFire is one of the sponsors at this event and hopes to connect with developers & media folk who use phones creatively. We’re also there to learn valuable information from the many insightful speakers that will attend. A few of the confirmed attendees for this conference include executives from Mahalo, Rubicon and CentralDesktop.

The best part, there’s a fun “80s Tech Prom” mixer and many members of the CallFire team will be there! If you are planning on attending Twiistup, find the folks in CallFire t-shirts and introduce yourself.

Cloud Call Centers and Hosted IVRs seem to be the #1 way to reduce the overall carbon footprint of your call center or small business workforce.

Reduce emissions by hiring from home

The average US call center agent commutes 24 miles via automobile.
In a 50-week year, this agent will account for 6,000 miles/yr.
The average agent carbon footprint is about 2 tons of C02 each year!

Slash call center startup costs & reduce waste

The average call center requires 130-200 square feet per agent.
Agents require a PC, telephone & high speed internet connection.*
A 100-seat call center can save 168,000 kWh/yr by homsourcing.
*Note: Utilizing idle computing hardware seems to be a green trend.  Watch “The Story of Stuff” with Annie Leonard.

Cloud Call Centers lead to happy agents

Improve employee satisfaction by reducing commuter costs, reducing parking frustration & vehicle wear.
Hire the best agents anywhere in the world, while targeting low-cost geographies.
Increase agent productivity & decrease sick-leave as it did for Holland America Cruise Lines.

Now that Cloud Call Center agents can use their own home office, PC and internet connection, the barriers to develop call centers for the enterprise and SMB markets are reducing quickly.  With $0 hardware and no recurring infrastructure costs, hiring from home is both sustainable & preferable to most US business owners.