Top ways to use SMS, Call & Voice API

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Vijay Sharma — No Comments ↓

API for Cloud Telephony - Voice, SMS & Call with Exotel

What are the top ways any company or individual can utilize our API to help improve their productivity and business efficiency? We get, asked that often, so we came up with a small list of already existing real-use-cases which can give you even better ideas of how to use our Exotel API which allow integration with our Calling, Voice & SMS features.

With no particular order of preference, see some of the amazing ways our API are being used:

1. Pingdom type update when website goes down – see what Sanjay Goel from Must See India has to say in this video at the end

2. Find music inside your busy phone number by Akash Manohar

3. Full CRM integration by Practo’s Epicenter with Exotel API to track all calls with customers and team.

4. Asking your customers to SMS into a phone number for support activities by Apartment ADDA.

5. Click 2 Call Widget by the Belita team on their website.

6. Reducing response time to customers in a cut throat environment of consumers buying tickets online and offline, redBus uses our API to automatically call customers who show interest.

7. Real-time status check of delivery orders by Gharpay, using IVR to get order tracking updates LIVE!

8. Locating the operator, whether your number is on DND (NDNC) registry, and the location of a phone number in India, again by Akash Manohar (who used to keep wanting to hack on our API after looking at Twilio API (Which is not available in India)).

We are also now getting individual developers to come and build more applications using our API, and you can try integrating our product with some of the services, solutions you provide to your customers as well.

So what are we saying? 3 things:

1. If you are a developer, want to use our API and build applications and sell with us, come sign up!
2. If you are an IT company looking to integrate and take your existing solutions (CRM, LMS, websites etc.) to the next level, integrate our call, SMS API and sign up.
3. And, we WANT to hear which from the above is the coolest hack so far?

Try our API

Tagged with: API, Bulk SMS, cloud telephony, Exotel, IVR, IVR Outbound calls, SMS
Posted in Customers, Ecosystem, Exotel, General, SMS

Cold Calling 2.0 – qualifying leads for sales in India?

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Vijay Sharma — No Comments ↓

$Cold Calling by Rackafracka.com$

As more and more businesses like Nowfloats, Zepo, GoDaddy, Bigrock bring businesses online, the power of inbound marketing is growing even in India.

In the Silicon Valley there is an interesting concept of Cold Calling 2.0 growing driven by Aaron Ross with “Predictable Revenue” and maybe if you have time you should read it. But our focus is on explaining Cold Calling 2.0 and how it helps, or it has and will help. We at Exotel are also not yet completely involved in implementing this well, but we do it in bits and parts.

Cold Calling 2.0 is basically a way to call up prospective leads who sign up for your product or show interest, and you refine the lead and qualify it before passing it onto the sales or conversion team.

$Cold Calling by Rackafracka.com$

Marketing must take ownership of Cold Calling 2.0 why?
1. The leads coming from offline, online activities will not be completely qualified.
2. If the marketing team which is spending time and money on getting leads, is qualifying leads, they will know and understand the pulse of who is a good lead and what marketing activity is working, and who is a bad lead and which marketing activity is leading to those type of leads.
3. Cold Calling to random businesses and people is not the best way, as it is termed Promotional and Tele-Marketing calls which have now strict guidelines by TRAI.
4. Sales can focus on converting qualified leads and maximize their time and money worth.
5. Sales-Marketing is in much better sync, and a process which is effective and repetitive is built in the organization.

We currently use 4 technology products and are still figuring this out, but a combination of Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Pipedrive and our own Exotel system help us improve our sales and conversion rates.

Any of you tried Cold Calling 2.0? Let us know if you have any good inputs.

Tagged with: Call Center Operations, Marketing, SaaS, sales, startup ecosystem india
Posted in Call Center, Ecosystem, General

Cash on Delivery (COD) solution for Indian E-Commerce

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Vijay Sharma — No Comments ↓

Cash On delivery application solution for Indian E-Commerce

We have over 100+ E-Commerce companies today using Exotel and a lot of them wanted to solve a major problem of their’s – i.e. Cash on Delivery automation. Many a times, a lot of companies who provide cash on delivery services (and many of them have upto and more than 50% sales via CoD) end up losing a lot of money in inventory management due to failed orders, or return orders from fraud customers.

We have done a good study around how our E-Commerce customers were managing their calls earlier as well, and at what times they should man more people behind the call centers. Some interesting observations from this study led us to believe that we should not only allow our customers to use our API, but also provide them a simple solution, just to tackle this issue, and so we have!

The major pain points of our customers in their CoD verification were:
1. Employing more people to call and confirm with customers that the order should be shipped or not.
2. Automating the process by either using one of the four processes, missed call verification, automated IVR call (outbound or inbound), or SMS (2 way interactive or 1 way to confirm as an OTP).

Our Cash on Delivery application is a simple app, which allows you to upload a list of numbers, to send automated SMS confirmations, or IVR confirmation calls, and get data back from the customers. We have been able to learn a lot from some of our cash on delivery enablers such as Gharpay, Delhivery and Chhotu who are all Exotel customers as well.

So if you don’t have a technology team or don’t want to use their time in building a CoD verification system over IVR, Calls, missed calls and SMS then utilize our Cash on Delivery application which will help solve your problems with a small click.

Start your free trial now and try the application for your E-Commerce store, or marketplace website (Which is a growing trend).

Tagged with: cloud telephony, IVR, IVR Outbound calls, SMS
Posted in Customers, E-Commerce, Product, SMS

What is a good Call Conferencing solution for teams in India?

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Vijay Sharma — No Comments ↓

Call Conferencing : Tele or Audio conferencing solutions in India and what must be improved?

What is that is most evolving in this fast paced world of the internet? Mobile teams, and people who can work from home or from multiple offices across the country, and still be able to co-relate and work together on the same projects. Leaving aside the possible very-very expensive CISCO, Polycom solutions for audio/video conferencing, what is available towards an Indian SME or a small team in India? The questions asked on forums is “What is the alternative to Sabsebolo”?

Well, before we get into the alternatives, let us see the 3 major problems for Indians who want to use a simple call conferencing solution:

1. Stop fixing yourself to a room, be Mobile: The slightly high end one’s require a fancy phone system and are too costly, and require someone to dial-in from the physical device. What age are we living in? Binding people to a technology device? Should you not be mobile and virtual? All the call conferencing solutions provided by some of the telecom companies such as Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL, MTNL, Reliance, TATA are still very fixed, though good.

2. Record Conference calls, it helps take minutes and refresh and focus on the call/meeting: Then, you think oh! Sabsebolo gives the option to setup a conference call bridge, which we can join from any device, without having to physically be stuck to a room or device. Great, but what about minutes of the meeting? If all of you are moving, and all of you join from the cell phone, who is going to take notes? Why don’t you get a smarter call conferencing solution which gives you the minutes via a simple call recording to your emails. Everyone who participated can go back and refresh their memory. Will that not be perfect?

3. Stability and Reliability: A nice question I read somewhere, and which is true, “What is the least awful audio conferencing solution out there?” , and you think, that a simple business team in India, working remotely does not have a simple call conferencing solution for themselves?

Let us recap: No infrastructure, Call Recording, and stability – you have it all bundled into our Call Conferencing application at Rs. 400 a month for upto 5 users! , it is called Huddle, you know like the mighty mighty Titans

Why don’t you read what 2 of our customers feel about the Huddle application:

Rachit Parekh, VP, BITS Alumni Association, BITS Spark – “We at BITSAA have been using the Exotel call conference huddle application for BITS Spark for the past 8 months. It has been simple to use for our participants around the world (sometimes dialing in from 3 continents) and the Exotel team has also continuously added features to improve the experience. We’ve never faced any downtime and and call quality has been excellent!”

Premdeep Gangadharan, Co-founder and Director, FansonStands mentions how they were bridging their US partner, and other Indian team mates, from Hyderabad, Mumbai, London and Bangalore, and it would always be a pain. “We read about you guys in the Times of India, and said wow, let’s try this out. It worked, and we are using it happily, solves a lot of problems and is worth the small investment”

Btw, we forgot to tell you to sign up and choose a PIN and make the conference moderated as well!

Tagged with: call conferencing, cloud telephony, Exotel, technology, Telecom Infrastructure
Posted in Customers, Exotel, Product, Telecom

Exotel Mumbai Office- End to a Daunting search for an office space

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Ruchir Kanakia — No Comments ↓

We at Exotel were talking about setting up a Mumbai office for more than 7 months. Initially office was not required and we managed by working from home, but as we grew and acquired more clients it became difficult to manage with working from home. So when one of my colleagues decided to move to Mumbai, we finally started our search for an office space.

A short guide to what we did

Narrowed the area where we want to setup the office keeping in mind requirements like

How much space do we require ?
What is our rental budget ?
Do we need a fully furnished office, semi furnished or unfurnished ?
Do we want a commercial space or residential cum commercial ?

After answering all these questions. Look up for listings on magic bricks or 99acres and try and contact the owners directly. Most of the times ads on these sites are posted by brokers hence invariably you might have to go through them. Also try and contact local brokers in the area which you have zeroed down. Brokers will charge 1 month’s rent for brokerage and you might have to split the registration and stamp duty cost for the agreement with the owner.

While selecting an office space ensure that it is accessible to all your employees and that they don’t spend much time traveling, this is necessary to increase their productivity. Hence having a central location in the city would be handy. Then figure out the basic requirements like uninterrupted supply of Electricity, Water and Internet are there. In a city like Mumbai, proximity to station is always good to have.

Our search finally ended after a month and the result is an office which is 2-5 mins walking from Dadar Station. Our potential/existing customers can walk in here whenever you want to meet us. Startups are more than welcome to work when they have space constraints.

Exotel Techcom Pvt Ltd,

A-302, Prathmesh Building,

Off N.C. Kelkar Road, Kolsa Galli,

Dadar (West), Mumbai-400028

Landmark- Opposite Plaza Theatre, Near Dadar Station

PS: If any start-up is around in this space, or is looking to work from an office in and around Dadar during meetings or generally, feel free to ping us and use our office, more than willing to help more like us.

Tagged with: Exotel, mumbai, startup ecosystem india
Posted in Exotel, General

Top 10 reasons to use missed calls in India

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ajay Bhise — No Comments ↓

“Give me a missed call when you are leaving the house and I will see you there.” Doesn’t this sound familiar?

Late Dhirubhai Ambani tried his best to ensure that the call rates remain the cheapest but then why pay for something when you can get it for free? We Indians, seem to have found something that unites us with the invention of the absolute zero. We never let go of an opportunity to save money on our calls, and the best way to do this? Missed calls. This is a convenient method to convey a mutually understood message, and saves cash too!

For, the Great Indian Missed Call, the weapon of choice for perpetually broke pre-paid users like students and migrant labourers is turning out to be a Rs500-crore business opportunity for banks, FMCG majors, even political parties.

While individual consumers, especially of the pre-paid variety 96% of India’s 900 million mobile user base give a missed call to pass on mundane objective information like ‘Have reached destination’, or ‘Call me back,’ companies use this as a kind of Morse Code for customer feedback, saving millions of rupees in call-centre charges and telephone bills.

What could be the reason behind the tendency of the Indian populace to give missed calls? With the Telecom giants slashing rates as days go by and handsets getting cheaper, owning a mobile phone is not a distant dream for many. As recently reported , about 40 percent of the future 250 million Indian wireless subscribers will be from the rural areas. This clearly signifies that India’s booming mobile telephony sector will continue its steady upward march with a major share of its growth originating from the rural areas.

From Anna Hazare, Amir Khan, the IPL to our very own Autowala, “giving a missed call” has become a common phrase amongst people, and the habit may soon replace our good old SMS.

Here are the top 10 reasons why a missed call is given :-

1) To convey a short message

2) Requesting a call back

3) To communicate with Auto/Cab Drivers

3) To subscribe for an offer

4) To register a Vote for an online poll

5) Balance Enquiry

6) COD Verification

7) To show Support towards a social cause

8) To register a phone number to be saved

9) To support your IPL Team

10) Attendance (Yes!)

I happened to strike a conversation with my 12 year old cousin who has a phone now:

“We talk every week and say practically the same things to each other.

From now, I’ll just give you a missed call. One ring means my health is fine. Two rings means the studies, too, are going well.And three means you still haven’t gotten me the cricket bat you promised.If there is a fourth ring, please take the call because it means there’s something urgent to talk.”

Ha!, how smart is that?

The habit seems to be catching up fast.

On the flipside, it may make you give a missed call to fire brigade if the house is on fire.

Like the post, why don’t you give me a missed call? , or add in comments, what do you give missed calls for, and we will add it to the list.

Try out our Missed Call application Miss Call for free

Tagged with: India, missed calls, Transactional
Posted in Ecosystem, General, Marketing

Guide to Mobile Number Portability and Ownership Transfer

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Ruchir Kanakia — No Comments ↓

You can choose across a various service telecom providers in India like Reliance, TATA, Airtel, Aircel, Vodafone, BSNL and Idea

I recently got my number ported from Operator A to Operator B. As an experiment, I tried this for both postpaid and prepaid number.

Given below are the steps which you need to follow, these are the same steps which you will find on most of the telecom operator’s website too. I will try and through some insights to the problems I faced and how best you can work around it.

When you are in the process of a mobile phone number portability process, how will the SMS appear in India?

Send a message as PORT <space> Mobile Number to 1900 Eg: PORT 7777777777 and send this message to 1900. You will receive a UPC Code in message. Note it down. The UPC is valid for 15 days (30 days in case of J&K, NE & Assam Service Areas).
Now goto the nearest Customer service centre or the retailer of the operator you want to shift to and fill the Form and pay Rs. 19. In the form you have to mention UPC Code ( From Step 1). Submit your Identity, Address Proof and Photograph. For Corporate/Company connections a NOC is required for MNP, duly signed and stamped on the company letter head by the authorized signatory of the company along with the other documents.
The customer centre will give a empty sim, after your payment and document submission. With in 1 day you will receive an acceptance message to confirm the porting.
Change over takes place on the 7th working day (15th working day in case of Jammu & Kashmir, Assam and North East service areas). You will get an SMS from the operator with the date and time for porting. The service disruption time shall be around 2 hrs during night time of the date/time of porting.
Insert the new sim in your phone, Now you are in the new network with old number.

Once you ported to new operator, the minimum time to stay with the new operator is 3 months. So in this 3 months time you cannot port your number once again. Also MNP currently is possible only within your telecom circle Eg- MH circle number cannot be ported to KA circle, It can be ported from say Vodafone-MH to TATA-MH only.

I have gone through this process for both prepaid as well as postpaid connections and in my experience porting a prepaid sim card is the fastest and more easier than post paid.

The reasons which make porting a postpaid connection difficult are as follows

You need to clear all your dues up to the time of porting (when there is a 2 hour service disruption). In case you have any dues pending, your current operator can reject your porting request.
During this time you will get calls from the retention team of the current operator asking you the reasons for porting out and they will try and resolve your problem and offer you competitive plans to retain you.
After getting past these hurdles, they will finally honor your MNP request. It took me 10-14 days to port my postpaid number out.

For prepaid, there was not much hassle and the transition was very smooth. As promised, it took 7 working days for the porting to happen. The reason being 25.0%* of an Operator’s revenue comes from 4.0%* of it’s postpaid customers. Hence when you port out a prepaid connection the revenue impact to the operator is not much. (*Rough Estimate)

My suggestion would be convert your postpaid connection to prepaid and then the MNP process will be very smooth.

How to switch mobile number network operator

We try and tell you the fastest and easiest way to move out of an existing telecom operator giving you troubles to another one.

Transfer of Ownership is a very tricky procedure and each operator has his own set of rules which they follow. For example Operator A will charge you some amount as transfer fee, Operator B will refuse Transfer of Ownership since it does not adhere to some of its policy. In India, we have more than 8 telecom operators and this process is very operator specific. Hence you will need to get in touch with your operator to know the exact procedure.

Also MNP process can be used in case you want to do Transfer of Ownership as well. In this case all you need to do is submit the documents of the new owner to the new operator while doing the above MNP procedure.

If you need any further elaboration on the procedure or have any doubts or queries please refer to the links below

http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/measuresto%20protectconsumerinterest/Customer_Guide.pdf

http://www.coai.com/docs/MNP%20Porting%20Procedure%20&%20FAQ.pdf

Tagged with: Phone Number, Phone Number portability, Telecom Infrastructure, TRAI
Posted in General, Phone Numbers, Telecom

Why do Businesses buy vanity/special numbers?

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Ruchir Kanakia — No Comments ↓

I always get flurried with requests for vanity numbers at Exotel. I never quite understood why it was so necessary for these businesses to have a vanity number. This got me curious so I did a bit of research around this. I was a firm believer that for any business, product and quality of service are the key element for their enhanced customer experience. For example for F&B industry, the quality and delivery of food is key to their businesses. I missed a few important elements here which are convenience, always reachable and Brand impact.

A special or vanity number is a phone word which is a alphanumeric equivalent of a telephone number. Example- 1800-GO-FEDEX, +91 9243-EXOTEL. In the USA, you will find many companies flaunting special toll free numbers, I am wondering why hasn’t this trend started in India?

In India, you can get such numbers with out any cost from any operator. Most of the operators we have dealt with do not charge for such a number. As a Indian business owner do you think you should consider such a number? It is at least not going to cost the business owner, so why not try is one suggestion. To make a concrete decision, here are few pros and cons

Upsides

Vanity number helps in attracting new customers. With easy to remember numbers your business can grow by word of mouth publicity which cannot be bought by money. Also it is very convenient for customers to tell other prospective customers about your phone number and business offering.
Branding and Positioning your company- How you position your business and how you organically grow determines your success and market share. A vanity number helps in doing both. It also helps in bringing credibility to the business and gives the customer assurance of the product or service you provide.
Higher Response Rate to advertising due to vanity number effectively translates in to higher traction, visibility and grow at a faster rate than desired. According to many surveys we have found out that vanity numbers increase the response rate by ~30-60%.

Downsides

Many cell phones today don’t include letters on the numeric keypads anymore, making it difficult for dialing out the phone number if you recall the vanity version
Use of vanity phone numbers with letters instead of numbers results in local search engines being unable to match your phone number up with the business listings in their database.
Vanity numbers are good for memory and not so good for dialing. What I mean by this is that when you use these numbers for print advertising you should always give the numerical version of the number. For example- 1800-ASK-USPS should be 1800-275-8777

Now, I guess it is up to you whether you want to go ahead and get these special numbers for your company. I have my doubts if people remember such number but I guess it definitely would help in building the brand.

In case, if you need such a number for your company, please check if we have one here http://exotel.in/ci/phonenumbers

Posted in General

Vanity Poker – Bringing Sanity into Vanity Phone Numbers

Posted on April 15, 2013 by shivku — 1 Comment ↓

A few months ago, I sent a mail to the Citizens of the Gaulish Village,

Folks, We are going to play a special game called “Vanity Poker” with the SIM cards in the shelves during the next hang-out.

What is Vanity Poker, You ask? Vanity numbers or Fancy numbers are good looking phone numbers. For example, Justdial has 8888888888 (Curious to Find circle of this phone number? Also, news from the grapevine is that Justdial paid 60 lakhs to Idea for this number). Exotel has a few of them too. Being a scarce resource, Fancy numbers warrant a premium compared to normal numbers. Typically, it is a one time extra fee. Operators charge extra money for these numbers and, in turn, we charge our customers as well (sometimes with a markup). But what is a good looking number? Who decides how “fancy” the number is? How are the prices set? And why do these numbers deserve the price tags they come with?

Operators did it randomly, which meant, it was based on the judgement of a few people. There was no consistency and that bothered me. It was a question of morality. Choosing 4000Rs as one time fee over 3000Rs for a number cannot depend on a person’s mood. It was also not sustainable. Over time, I would have developed a primal instinct on these price tags but if I quit, the next guy will have to start from randomness again.

So, I decided to bring some sanity into vanity. The inspiration comes from Poker. My goal was to come up with a framework that can be coded (computer coded, I mean) so that we don’t need a debate on these price tags. The poker folks already have an hierarchy based on Probability. The variables being colors and numbers on the playing card. So, Can we hack it? Here is how:

1) Instead of the 5 numbers in a poker hand, we have 10 in a phone number. The first 3 or 4 digits are static given an operator & we don’t have control over that. So, lets work with the last 6.

2) The hand that depends only on color is “Flush”. So, There is no equivalent of Flush in Vanity Poker.

3) Because we have more numbers to work with, we can add a few more categories. We added Three pairs, Triplet, and Two of a Kind.

4) Also, many poker hand names are quite confusing and not easy to remember. So, wouldn’t it be appropriate if we Indianize some of the names? Give it a bit of Masala?

5) Finally, the point is not to be correct. Not all good looking numbers may be categorized with our Poker. If there are exceptions, people jump in to fix it.

Here is what we ended up with

Poker Category	Customer friendly Category names	Example	Cost
Royal Flush	Haute Bride – Highly fashionable sexy numbers	9212192121	Custom.
Straight Flush	Haute Bride – Highly fashionable sexy numbers	9212112345	Custom.
Four of a Kind	Executive – Fewer keystrokes & hence faster to dial	9212111113, 9212131111	6000
Full House	Executive – Fewer keystrokes & hence faster to dial	9212133322	6000
Three Pairs*	Item number – Numbers that look pretty	9243212121	6000
Three of a Kind	Rock star – Numbers with a sound of music. Easy to say	9212133324, 9212187555	3000
Sequence (atleast three)	Numerology – Numbers that are mystically related to each other	9212414243	3000
Triplet*	Teen Patti – Numbers easy to Say yet light on the wallet	9243624624	1200
Two Pair	Judwa – Fewer dial strokes yet light on the wallet.	9212122447, 9212122744	1200
Two of a Kind	Sita & Gita – Easy to say. Costs much less.	9212126060	1200
One Pair	Khiladi Number 1 – Numbers that just gets the job done	9212122789	Free
Normal	Khiladi Number 1 – Numbers that just gets the job done	9212132789	Free

Then someone came up with the master stroke. We are a “Pay as you go” company. Why ask for a “one time” fee at all? That made sense. We know the average life time of a number with a customer. What if we spread this fee over the lifetime?

That finishes the explanation on Vanity Poker. The game is very interesting to all of us at Exotel. But, why is this important to you? Now you know why the rentals of different phone numbers are different.

Tagged with: cloud telephony, Exotel, Phone Number, pricing, Telecom Infrastructure, vanity phone numbers
Posted in Exotel, General, Phone Numbers, Telecom