How to Use Automated Phone Calls for Your Business
You may have heard about automated calls for business. There’s a reason for that. For every thriving business, marketing is essential. But even that is secondary to an even more critical factor that lays the foundations of all marketing and customer services in an organization, i.e., communication.
How a business communicates with its customers, employees, and other stakeholders plays a vital role in generating leads, increasing sales, keeping the customers informed through updates and reminders, and reaching a mass audience. Some businesses even prefer communicating through certain articles aimed at helping the customers.
Automated phone calls for your business are key to better communication as they help it grow, prosper, and reach a vast target market in a matter of seconds. For instance, during the recent pandemic, automated text messages and calls helped save many lives from the Coronavirus. How do we set it up? What benefits can it possibly offer? Which service is best for setting it up? Let’s read further and find out more together.[2]
Automated Phone Calls for Business: What is it?
When it comes to automated phone calls for your business, the simplest explanation of automated phone calls for business is that it is a pre-recorded call broadcast to a large number of people with ease. All you have to do is record a message, schedule it, and send it to every number mentioned in the list without dialing them all individually.
An automated phone call is carried out via an interactive voice response, or IVR, making it possible to interact with humans and machines over a phone call.
Automated phone call systems come in three different types, depending on what you might require them for. For instance, an inbound calling system is an ideal response system for when a customer calls to inquire about your product or has a query about your business. The system either addresses their needs or connects to the appropriate person or department.
Then comes an outbound calling system where instead of the customer calling you, it’s you who’s calling and connecting with the customer. There are multiple reasons to do that, such as dropping appointment reminders or asking for feedback, where you’d prefer a pre-recorded message to be played while leaving room for some interaction as well.
Lastly, if we mix the traits of both inbound and outbound calls, we get a hybrid calling system. This system makes it possible to both make calls and accept calls.
How to Set up an Automated Phone Call System
Setting up automated phone calls for business is much easier than one would usually expect from a technology that does complex tasks.
But before you consider a cheap offer, perhaps you should think through your options carefully; after all, the reputation of your brand is at stake here. You wouldn’t want to risk that with a system that has more flaws than benefits. The key is spending on the right software and provider that will provide you with the quality services you need, specially tailored to your unique case.
In most cases, you can start by signing up for the service provider and testing basic appointment reminders. These reminders can either be selected through a variety of templates in the system or be custom-made using text to speech, a pre-recorded message, or a combination of both.
Lastly, you need to upload the contact list of your customers to schedule appointments, or setup an integration with either Google or Outlook Calendar. If you find the integration part a tad bit difficult, there’s nothing to worry about as your chosen service provider should be able help you set up the automated phone call system for your business.
Related (Reduce No-Shows with Automated Phone Call & Text Message Appointment Reminder Service)
How to Use Automated Phone Calls?
There are more ways to use an automated phone call system than you may think. With the ability to broadcast pre-recorded messages and communicate with the target audience, the purpose of these calls varies according to your business needs. Common users are providing regular services, announcing upcoming events, sales, sending weather alerts, marketing, and appointment reminders. All types of notification messages can be sent with an automated phone call system.
Here, we discuss a few critical aspects of how to use automated phone calls for business, regardless of whether it is an already established business or you are just starting.
Get Live Leads
Since you can reach countless people in one go, why not utilize the technology and generate live leads? You can deliver the right message to your contacts about your product, service, company, and offer them a chance to connect with an agent immediately. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee 100% success because some might hang up or call the agent later. In any case, some systems will offer a report that analyzes the progress with every automated call for generating leads.
Send Alerts
Sending alerts through text messages and emails is an effective technique; however, there is always a chance that someone will miss the alert or read it too late. For matters that require immediate attention, such as large cash or online transactions, the automated call can alert the customer in time. This would ensure that there isn’t any possibility of fraudulent transactions and the customer stays informed.
Send Reminders
As humans, it is only natural for us to lose track of things and forget important commitments due to a hectic schedule. With automated calls, it is easier and much cheaper to send reminders to your customers than risk them missing an appointment or task. These reminders could be about anything, from payments due to reminders of their appointments, so they don’t miss out the next day. In fact, all sorts of prompts and reminder messages can be relayed easily and quickly with automated scheduled calls.
Get Feedback
For any service or product that you provide to your customers, it can boost the customer experience and inform you of areas for improvement if you ask for their feedback.
Usually, feedback is recorded either through a form or a traditional call where the agent feeds the data in the CRM for the record. However, with automated calls, there will not be a need for an agent and multiple calls. Linking a simple survey to the system and asking people to push numbers between 0-9 to answer makes it easy to obtain feedback automatically.
Notify
You can also opt for automated calls if and when there is any change in your services, prices, or any other matter that you feel your customers should know. Your one call will notify all of your customers in one go.
Offer Promotions
As a business looking to grow and thrive, you would always appreciate the opportunities to market your brand. Reaching more and more people is always the goal behind paid marketing and advertising so your sales can go up.
With automated calls, you can do that yourself. All you have to do is use an automated call to notify your users about each offer or promotion that your business is currently offering. Hundreds or even thousands of people will stay updated with an automated call feature, improving your sales in the long run.
Connect with Employees
As the focal person in your team, it is up to you to communicate with your target market effectively and keep each person updated. For any emergency, it is better to opt for an automated phone call instead of following the manual call tree, where you call someone, and they call the next person, and so on. You can easily call everyone simultaneously and let them know if there are any changes in the schedule due to new developments or changes in the weather conditions.
Create Shift Schedules
Has an employee called in sick or can’t show up for work at the last minute? At these moments, you have to contact your team and consider their schedules to see who you could replace the sick person for the shift.
Usually, it’s not a piece of cake, but it can be one with an automated call service. You can contact your employees, and they can select an option from the keypad menu. Meanwhile, the data will automatically be integrated into the calendar to see who’s available as a replacement and who’s not.
Reach your Voters
If your business has something to do with a political campaign, automated calls can do wonders in ensuring that the public knows about your drive and recognizes you. For any message you have for the voters, you can broadcast it through an automated phone call and even reach the people from remote or rural areas. The audio messages can be customized according to your campaign, thus, increasing the chances of you winning.
Benefits of Automated Phone Calls
Regardless of the number of customers you might have, calling them individually to remind them of something or notify them of a new offer will only turn out to be a hassle. With automated phone calls, your pre-recorded reminders can notify your customers within seconds, and you wouldn’t have to worry about anything.
The best part? The customers would appreciate the gesture of a reminder call without talking to a representative about it.
Wider Audience
First and foremost, the most important element of using an automated call system is that your business is now open to a wider audience. With each passing minute, there can be hundreds of people receiving your pre-recorded messages, either live or in their voicemails, to be checked later. This increase in reach plays a crucial role in getting more benefits from an automated system, such as marketing, promotions, sales, notifications, emergency alerts, etc.
Frees up Time for Employees
With the rapid rise in technology, we can perform multiple and sometimes complex tasks with ease in a short span of time. What a human might take hours to do, a machine will take barely a minute. Not only is it productive for your business, but it will also help your employees to focus on other tasks.
Caller ID
For every number that you call or one that calls you, there is a certain caller ID given to it. If your phone system is integrated with the CRM, you can easily check the credentials and know who the person is before you speak to that person. This helps in keeping track of different callers throughout the day and builds a foundation for more personal conversations.
Related (Benefits of a Virtual Phone System for Businesses and Remote Employees)
The Precautions You Should Consider
As helpful as automated phone calls are, they can result in annoying your customers too. If they are called numerous times in a short period for mostly unnecessary things, it will negatively impact your business.
Similarly, sometimes the systems hang and call one user multiple times a day, so they block the number itself. This can lead to the impression that your business might be conducting spam or fraudulent activities. The Federal Communication Commission has constructed several rules and regulations for outbound automated calls that you must comply with, so be certain you are up to date on requirements.
Choose a Platform with Robust Features
VoiceShot provides the highest quality voice broadcasting solutions and virtual phone systems for small businesses and enterprises. We offer numerous services and features, such as outbound calling, appointment setting, emergency notifications, text messaging, and a voice and text API.
What makes our service stand out from the rest is the fact that our platform doesn’t use VoIP, which several providers usually use. The reason behind this is pretty simple – quality. A standard VoIP deal can result in poor quality service and several issues, such as calls being blocked by carriers as spam. VoiceShot uses dedicated Copper/PRI lines to ensure your message is delivered quickly and reliably. Sign up today.
If you want to give VoiceShot a shot, watch our demo or get in touch with our customer service representative here!