Do you need customers?
If your answer to this question is negative, then you cannot waste time reading this article. For the rest I will tell the following story.
Last week, one of our users from another country wrote to me on Skype about the following:" We want to request a commercial offer for technical support for your software from a partner, company XXX. Do you know if this company works? I don’t have their cell phone. The office phone does not respond. Email gives an error."
Generally, it is an interesting situation. A person working and living in the same city as our partner, asks me, who lives thousands of kilometers from their city, if such a company works. By chance, or maybe without it, I corresponded just a day before with one of the employees of this company. They work remotely and apparently forgot to forward their office phones to cell or home phones. Naturally, I helped our partner and customer get in touch. But this could not have happened if this customer hadn’t contacted me. He would find on our website other partners in their city or country and give money to others. I had a question: does this company really not need customers, maybe they have a bunch of orders? I asked that. They answer: "There are no orders. Now all projects have been stopped due to quarantine. Occasionally they only remotely help their clients solve small problems." It could be assumed that the employees of this company do not know enough about the capabilities of modern telephone systems. But this is not so. This company is a system integrator, supplier of telephone systems and has been operating on the market for more than a dozen years. So, it is just someone's mistake. And its result is a potentially lost customer. And maybe other customers called to them with the same success?
How to minimize possible losses due to such or similar errors?
We already wrote that our call accounting and billing system, Tariscope, allows you to track and automatically generate reports on unanswered calls by sending them by e-mail.
Now we want to dwell on another Tariscope feature. It allows you to promptly receive information about a missed (unanswered) call immediately after it was made. In the Tariscope system, the Tariscope Observer service handles information about the calls made (CDR, SMDR, AMA, etc.). The service has the ability to respond to certain events. One such event is the end of processing information about a particular call. This event can be used for any additional processing of call information. For example, to identify fraud. A separate article on the site is devoted to this topic. Now we will consider the possibility of sending an e-mail to a given e-mail address that there was an unanswered call. For this purpose, there is a special script contained in the MissedReaction.cs file. Those users who wish to receive information about missed calls should be associated it in the Tariscope system with the event of “New call processed”. The script allows you:
- To set extensions (internal phone numbers) for monitoring missed calls. For all other extensions, no action will be performed. Naturally, all extensions can be controlled.
- To set external phone numbers from which an incoming call will be expected. This is an optional parameter and the script can react to a call from any phone number.
- To set the email addresses where to send a message about a missed call. It is easy enough to upgrade the script to send messages only to the caller.
- Sent data about the call contains the date, time of the call, from which number and to which number they called. If the Tariscope system contains the name of the external client associated with its extension, information on the calling party will also be provided.
Thus, this script allows you to always quickly receive information about missed calls and not lose potential customers.
If your telephone system has an interface that allows you to manage calls from a third-party application (TAPI), then this script can be modified to automatically connect the desired subscriber to the calling party.
If you are a telecom operator using the Tariscope Provider system, then the above script can be used either as an additional paid service for subscribers, or as a free service that increases subscriber loyalty.
If you are not yet a user of the Tariscope system, but you are interested in the indicated functionality of the system, then you can right now download and test this Tariscope feature for free.
