We get a lot of questions around how our local and toll-free phone numbers work. Hopefully this post helps to answer them.

Billing

A local phone number costs $1 per month, and a toll-free number costs $2 per month. When you buy a phone number from us, you have that number for a three-month commitment, so your initial cost will be $3 for local and $6 for toll-free. The CallFire system defaults to auto-renew the phone number once your commitment is over; however, should you wish to discontinue the phone number, you can do so by clicking on the phone number in your “My Numbers” (also called “Inbound Numbers”) page, and unchecking the box that says “Auto Renew number.”

Minutes used on your CallFire phone number are billed at 5¢ per minute, rounded up to the nearest minute.

Activation

When you first purchase a phone number, its status will initially read “Activating.” This process can take anywhere from just a few minutes up to 24 hours. While the number is activating, your phone number is not yet ready to accept calls. When the number is active and ready, the status of that number will be blank, and you should receive an email notification telling you the number has been activated.

Forwarding

When you buy a phone number from CallFire, it’s what’s known as a virtual phone number. This means that you’ll need an existing phone number, such as your office phone or your cell phone, for calls to forward to. You will set up call forwarding by clicking on “Configure Number” in your “My Numbers” page. In the box that says “Forward:,” type in your 10-digit existing phone number where you want the calls to go.

Recording Feature and Whisper Feature

If you check on “Record Call,” all incoming calls to your CallFire number will be recorded at no extra cost. You can listen to or download your recordings by visiting your Call Details Page.

If you check “Include Whisper” on your number, this means you can play a short message before the call is connected. This is helpful if you have several CallFire phone numbers that forward to the same place. Let’s say you’re a lawyer, and one of your ads with CallFire phone number 1 is focused on speeding tickets, but another ad with CallFire phone number 2 is focused on DUI cases. You could set a whisper so that you’ll know which ad the person calling is responding to.

To set up a whisper, simply type in a message. Our text-to-speech engine will read this to you before you greet the caller.

Like call recording, the whisper feature is also free of charge.

Tags

You’ll notice that on your “My Numbers” page, it says, “Click to Add Tags.”

Like a whisper, a tag will help you keep your numbers straight. So let’s use the previous lawyer example. If this phone number was on the ad regarding speeding tickets, you’d probably want to tag it with “Speeding Tickets,” like so:

This will make your calling reports much easier to understand.

Start Receiving Calls

When you’re all set up and want to start publishing your new CallFire phone number, don’t forget to configure your number to start receiving calls! To do so, simply check the box to the left of the phone number and click on Start Receiving Calls. Similarly, if you want to stop incoming calls, hit “Stop Receiving Calls.” The status of your phone number will change to either “Running” or “Stopped,” respectively.

Reporting

Once you start receiving calls to your phone number, you’ll be able to access your Call Detail Records. These records include helpful details such as:

• A map pinpointing where your calls are coming from
• The phone numbers of people who called
• Average talk time
• Timestamp of when each call started, and each call’s duration
• How many calls were transferred (or forwarded to your existing phone number)
• Billing Summary
• Each page is also exportable into CSV, PDF, Excel, or XML

Any more questions about Call Tracking or CallFire phone numbers? Feel free to post them in the comments.

Call forwarding: you love it. So much so you’ve bought a forwarding number from CallFire: 555.123.4567. Now you want to use it, so you have it set up to forward to your business number, let’s say that is 444.123.4567. Everyone knows that you can add identifying tags to this on the My Numbers page, but what about the campaign dashboard? When you navigate to that page, all you see are the two numbers sans tags, as in our example below.  Can’t we make that more readable?

Yes, we can! It’s sort of round about, but it does work. Simply click the red stop button to halt the campaign for a minute.

Once the campaign stops and moves to the lower section of your dashboard, the pencil icon magically appears. Click it.

Enter the new campaign name (we’re using Denver) and click Set.

Click the green start arrow to restart your campaign.

And voilà!

Now instead of having to review campaign 555.123.4567 => 444.123.4567, it instead displays as campaign Denver. And that’s all she wrote!

When a call is connected, your agent sees the SugarCRM contact instantly.  Here is an example:

How it works
If you embed this code in your Excel list, for each phone number, it will place a clickable link in the Agent pop-up window.   The link will open your browser based CRM.

Example code
2132212200<name of person>,<iframe src=”<<<<<  embed html link here >>>>>>>>>>>” width=”100%” height=”500″><p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p></iframe>/

<a href=”<<<insert crm link here>>>”><img src=”<<<insert image location here>>>” alt=”Call Me Now!” /></a>

Don’t want to use Javascript? Try:
<a href=”<<<put link here>>>” target=”callfireCrm”>Open CRM</a>

Want even more control? You can take your integration a step further with CallFire Voice APIs.   Developers can easily use SOAP web services calls to inject data directly to your Agent’s CRM interface, in real time!   Visit the CallFire Developer Wiki or call 877.897.3473. 

1) The Local telephone carrier is temporarily overloaded.  (This would be the equivalent of you calling a friend and hearing “All circuits are busy at this time.  Please try again later.)
2) A high dialing speed to a certain location can cause the telecom provider to reject calls.    For example, calling at 50 calls per minute (cpm) to a small town, or suburb, may be overwhelming for the telephone company in that area.    A good way to fix this: Mix lists containing numbers from different cities & states.   You can also reduce the speed of your campaign.
3) The phone number is temporarily, or permanently disconnected.