VoIP and Telephony Roundup

Since NCH is a leader in telephony and VoIP software, we want to give you as much information about these topics as possible in one place. Whether you are Wondering if Your Phone Got Left Behind in the Digital Transition, or if you are working on putting together a complete phone system for your home or office, here are some articles we have compiled over the last few months that will help you along the way:

• How VoIP Works
  
• How VoIP Can Help You Save, plus an example of some of those savings in action: Admin Corps Case Study on VoIP Savings
  
• Adding Voicemail to VoIP
  
• Call Recording Laws in the United States
  
• International Call Recording Laws and Regulations
  
• How Telephone On-Hold Messaging Can Help Your Business
  
• Tips For Designing an Interactive Voice Response Telephone System
  
• Auto Dialer Gives Added Power to Small Businesses Reaching Out to Customers and Clients
  
• When we added video call support to Express Talk for the Mac, we also talked about how video calling can be a great alternative to meeting in person especially when a team is spread out geographically
  

For more information about our different telephony software products that you can use to create a custom phone system solution, go to: www.nch.com.au/phone/index.html

Auto Dialer Software Gives Added Power to Small Businesses Reaching Out to Customers and Clients

There is an abundance of reasons your organization might want to call lists of people—whether for service calls on accounts to make sure customer relations are in good standing, reaching out to members when it is time for them to renew, notifying clients of an important change, or to meet an important fund-raising goal.

Between email and the Internet, the number of opportunities an organization has to put themselves in touch with their customer base has increased over the years, and businesses and groups are learning the best ways to take advantage. Developments in these fields have become an important component to Customer Relationship Management, and in some cases have come to overshadow some of the more traditional channels of communication like the telephone. Yet the value in person-to-person contact is still important, and technological progressions in phone system management are helping to keep phone calls an economical option for staying in contact with customers.

The new Axon Agent auto dialer is an add-on feature for our virtual PBX that makes it easier for everyone from call centers to charities to reach out to their customers, members or constituents. No matter the reason your organization has for placing calls, the longer the list of contacts gets the harder it is to manage the process. That is where an automated dialing system can really come in handy.

One of the wonderful things about NCH's virtual PBX, Axon, is that it is Windows based software, making it easy and accessible to small businesses that don't have the luxury of a full time IT staff to help configure and manage a more complex Linux phone system. The new auto dialer agent gives these smaller organizations another useful and powerful feature, making it easy and efficient to place phone calls to a list of people and to compete with their larger counterparts.

With the Axon Virtual PBX you can log-on to the weblet to set up not only lines and extensions for your phone system, but also to set up calling agents and outbound calling campaigns containing your list of contacts and a script for the agents to use when placing the phone calls. Agents can then log-in using Axon Agent and join a calling campaign. Axon does all the work of managing the campaign list and dialing for the agents, making sure that no duplicate calls are made and ensuring an efficient calling process.

Axon is just one of the telephony software applications offered by NCH, allowing any business to customize a solution for their unique needs. For another example, see automated outbound calling software for additional calling options that don't require operators to handle individual phone calls.

Auto Dial feature for Axon Virtual PBX in development

Axon virtual windows PBX is one of the keystone products of our telephony suite. The fact that Axon runs on a windows pc makes it much easier for small businesses to setup up a complete phone management system themselves, even without a dedicated IT person on staff.

A PBX is an important piece of a phone management for business or call centers, allowing you to create extensions for individuals, have internal dialing and other features like hold, transfer and voicemail, and soon we will be adding a new power dialing feature to Axon that will be another valuable addition for call centers and other small businesses that need to manage making outbound calls to a list of customers or potential clients.

Our development team has been working on adding an automatic dialer feature, similar to what you may think of as a predictive dialing system. This new power dialer will allow users in a call center type environment to share a list of contacts in a campaign by a list of agents (eg. sales staff or customer service personnel). When an agent is ready to make their next call, at the press of a button the auto dialer will automatically grab the next uncompleted person from the list and dial the number for them, which can save time.

This new feature will be similar to Express Dial which integrates with the Express Talk softphone for a single user, but by allowing multiple people to work off a campaign it helps expand the capabilities to better suit a small businesses or call center.

FTC bans robocalls and unsolicited automated telemarketing phone calls

Have you heard that starting today the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has put a ban on robocalls made by telemarketers? Telemarketers will now need written permission from the customer in order to practice this type of phone solicitation. Any telemarketer in violation of this new policy will face up to $16,000 in penalty charges per phone call.

NCH is excited at the thought of not having our day interrupted by robocalls. In fact, the chairman of the FTC, Jon Leibowitz, said, "American consumers have made it crystal clear that few things annoy them more than the billions of commercial telemarketing robocalls they receive every year."

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Calls that deliver information, as opposed to selling something, will not be affected by this ban. So things like automatic reminders about appointments or something like a bad weather delay or cancellation can still be made with an automated system.

As a company that offers a software product that can perform robocalls, we worried at first about our sales. What would be the impact the ban on robocalls would have on our IVM Answering Attendant? While we realize some sales may be lost, we have a great deal of confidence in IVM as more than a just robocall-software product. The list of features and benefits IVM provides extends way beyond automated outbound calling, including:

• Call attendant - use as a automated attendant to facilitate directing and transferring incoming calls.
• Connect to telephone line(s) using a professional telephony board, voice modem, directly to a VoIP service, or to a PBX like Axon Virtual PBX.
• Corporate voice mail solution for anywhere from a single line answering message to hundreds of voice mailboxes. Recorded messages can be played at any time, forwarded to an email address, or accessed remotely.
• Interactive Voice Response system design your own advanced IVR system for anything from an information line to a phone-in customer survey. The possibilities are endless.
• Call Logging - all calls are logged with the date, time and caller ID information.

So no more, “Congratulations, you’ve just won a free vacation,” or “Would you be interested in trying new car insurance.” We could not be happier that these pesky messages we did not sign up for will no longer be interrupting our daily life, but why not explore the other possibilities IVM Auto Attendant software can offer your business?