Today, everyone is on JustDial. Yes! Even Exotel. We’d subscribed to JustDial’s services a little while back and soon realized the power of this medium, although managing of JustDial leads was turning out to be slightly difficult. The power of a JustDial lead is inversely proportional to the time you take to initiate contact with them. If you’ve used JustDial to find something yourself, you wouldn’t be surprised by the various vendors bombarding your phone with calls to sell their services.

We at Exotel are a small team of Sales people, all automation freaks and it used to hurt us to see the leads go away unanswered as we practically couldn’t call them right away. What started as a casual conversation during lunch ended up becoming the JustDial app.

What does this app do?

This app combines the awesomeness of Exotel and JustDial.

Exotel’s JustDial App

So when people search for something like “Cab Companies” and JustDial decides to pass on the lead details to your cab company, in addition to getting a SMS and email from JustDial, a call is triggered first connecting to the customer and then to your Sales Team. Before they get a call, they will also get a pop-up for the incoming call and the call will have the name as something like “JAMUNAJustDial – Bangalore” implying that a person by name Jamuna searched for something relevant to your company in JustDial with city/area as Bangalore.

Benefits :-

• If you use the JustDial local search service for generating leads, those leads are now automatically processed and appear as contacts in Exotel
• If your Sales guy miss the call, an automated SMS is sent to their phones with the Lead Details so that they can call back.

The key to a JustDial lead is :- “get to him before anyone else does!”
Have a company listed on JustDial? Want to make the most of your JD leads?

Technology is changing to a stage that now, we all have smart phones. If phones can be smart phones, can’t phone numbers become Smart Phone numbers?

Future of Telephony

What makes a Smart Phone smart? The Apps, right?

We thought what good is a smart phone number with no Apps?  As a result of this discussion, the App Bazaar was born.

What is the App Bazaar?

The App Bazaar comprises of a bunch of Apps that can be put onto an Exotel smart phone number, Just like Apps on Smart Phones.

Exotel’s App Bazaar

Find this interesting? We’re still in the process of building an SDK and we’d love to hear your ideas. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section. Need a Smart Phone number?

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?

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.

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.

In this, we explain, assuming you take a single virtual phone number, then you can receive multiple calls and route the calls to multiple devices – either a mobile phone (making your team mobile) and or a land-line. These calls will also get recorded, and if you miss a call, you can leave a smart voice-mail post the call and get an update via e-mail or SMS of the missed call.

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).

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!

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

1. How much space do we require ?
2. What is our rental budget ?
3. Do we need a fully furnished office, semi furnished or unfurnished ?
4. 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.

“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.

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?

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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