We last month had revamped and improved our Reporting & Analytics functions in Exotel, but are always continuously listening to customers and solving problems for them:

The recent introduction is adding Geography based tracking of a phone number in your Call & SMS Reports.

What does this mean?

- You can now get the State to which a particular phone number belongs to

- This applies to both Land-line & Mobile Numbers

Had an opportunity to attend a very close-knit session with a lot of smart people on Google+ Hangout thanks to Ashish Sinha, Jayadevan from the NextBigWhat team and it had some stellar people sharing their experiences in the SaaS Inbound Marketing space like Paras Chopra of Wingify, Girish Mathrubootham from Freshdesk, Shekhar Kirani of Accel Partners, Krish Subramaniam from Chargebee, Tejaswi Naidu and few more folks (am sorry to have missed out on your names).

I’ll try and bundle together important learning’s from Paras/Girish/Krish/Ashish & Shekhar that I thought below:

1. There are no KPI’s for Content, Content has to be unique and awesome

2. There has to be a Content Marketing plan – you can’t just decide I will continue to roll out content constantly, there must be an aim and goal of different plans, and it must be measurable. There should be an end goal in mind and it should be strategic with what the company needs.

3. New possible un-explored content channels – Quick Videoes, Webinars, Slideshare.

4. PR helps in qualifying you in the mind of a prospective customer that you are in the news and hence must be doing something right.

5. Good E-Mail sign-up rates are 5-10% by industry standards.

6. Use PR to position yourself as a thought leader in the space you are trying to capture.

A lot of our prospective & current customers would ask for a few things presuming we would have average standard data on how companies are managing support, and we until recently for a vertical did not have any specific numbers, but now we do. People who want to know what time customers call, from typically where do customers call, what are the major shifts to load balance on operations and the duration of an average support call so they can plan their growth accordingly, so here it is:

We along with YourStory took out this report and infographic and released it here - http://yourstory.in/2013/02/e-commerce-whos-calling-in/

The interesting points are the following:

1. 87% of calls still come from the Metro cities (Tier 1 – NCR, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Hyderabad) , seems like the customers are still in the metro cities.

Shivku’s presentation on “Funding ka Funda”

Few months back, our man Shivku made a presentation on Fund-raising from his experiences with Exotel. Sharing it now.

Shashikiran & Srikanth reached out to us to possibly participate in the Startup Festival a month back, and they sent this video below to explain what the Startup Festival is about, once you see it, you will know why it is an amazing project and requires all the support from the startup ecosystem it can get.

We agreed to host a startup crawl session, where-in we will have 10-20 people who are interested in Entrepreneurship or already have started up, coming down to our office on 7th March, 1-2pm in Indiranagar to interact with us/our team and spend sometime with what it means to be at a young startup.

Our theme is: More Automation and less Humans. We want to share with everyone how we believe no human’s time should be spent on repeating a task again and again, and that it should be automated all the time, and that is how we with a small 18 people team are focussing on continuously improving. Ishwar – our Co-Founder & COO will be speaking and interacting with everyone. We will have some stuff to drink & eat as well, and a nice open veranda to have some fun. Do come over by buying your tickets from Startupfestival.in and participate in all the other awesome events as well.

Would like to thank the Startupfestival team for organizing this and allowing a lot more people to be exposed to the real startups around Bangalore and promote the culture of doing your own thing.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has been a constant topic for discussion among-st service providers, both small and large, and also consumers – both businesses & individuals.

Though multiple news items like Mint’s coverage here have suggested that the Telecom Policy act will be changing soon, it has still not been approved by TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) and as things stand, VoIP calls within India are illegal in the following ways:

1. No Call initiated over Internet can land on a physical mobile or landline handset within India.
2. No Call initiated on a mobile or landline handset phone can land on a computer over internet within India.

This still allows VoIP providers to help provide infrastructure to International Call Centers,and International facing clientele companies, but it is not possible to extend this scope yet for existing Indian businesses focusing on India as their primary market.

A few suggestions for companies looking to do tele-calling/support and sales with international customers:

1. If you are Big on call volumes, look at outsourcing or finding a VoIP solution from some vendor. Avaya, CISCO etc. are for the bigger players and normally starts in Lakhs & Crores!
2. If you are Small – use Skype , it is the best initial tool to utilize to converse with some of your customers.

So the question this post will answer in few quick points is, what does a business or an entrepreneur focusing on Indian customers/consumers do to solve his/her problem in interacting with them over voice?

Here are a few suggestions:

If you have massive call volumes of greater than 20,000-50,000 calls a day the advice would be to try 2 things:

1. Get a PRI (Primary Rate Interface) or lease-line setup, with a call center software solution which works over PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). Try the Avaya/CISCO setup and see if it works for you.

2. Outsource your call center to someone like an Epicenter who have special licenses to receive calls over VoIP (licenses that cost way beyond a small/medium businesses budget to buy).

If you have lower call volumes and are looking for a solution, you could utilize 2 types of services depending upon your needs:

3. Installing an EPABX solution and purchasing a PRI setup like above, but that mostly will come for a good incoming call management system, though not always providing you great integration with software’s nor data of the callers etc.

4. You could use a solution like ours – Exotel, we provide a cloud telephony platform which provides multiple services for a small business and we can set you up in 15 minutes after you create an account. Once done, you could use some of these features such as IVR, Call Recording & Data, API integration, SMS and Outbound Calling both manually and automatically via IVR.

For those with some questions (FAQ) around VoIP – read on, tried answering a few basic one’s we get all the time:

Q. Can I receive calls on my computer?
A. Yes, if the call originates from outside India and No, if the call originates in India.

Q. What is the best way to have noise reduction on the phone (mobile or landline) someone would use daily in a small call center environment?
A. Check out the photo of the people in the Zivame team in our case study and you will notice they have 3.5 MM headphone-cum-microphone headsets which they bought from the market. Stable and being used by lots of folks.

Q. Is the voice quality of PSTN better than VoIP?
A. It depends, and is debatable, but as of now if you are a business in India, you have no other alternative but to rely on some credible service provider. What we do at Exotel is to build mutliple redundancy within the system and product so that the quality is as good as it can be, and this is done via smart coding by the folks here. So, assume if your main line is down, and you are worried, that will affect your business, Exotel smartly switches you over to another line automatically

Q. Do I require Internet working full time for some of the alternative solutions to work?
A. Mostly No, we can answer for ourselves and Exotel calls continue going through over our multiple lines into your agents landline or mobile phone, and the calls will get recorded, data stored, just that he/she will not have a place to enter the details, apart from a pen or note book. But you can get the data back once your internet is up by checking the Exotel dashboards for call records and data.

With the rapid growth of modern day start-up ventures, finding office space seems to be a painful task. With land prices hitting the roof in all the major metros of the country, Virtual offices seem to be an increasingly popular affair. So we caught up with a few of our friends(more about them below) who were working out of Virtual offices i.e Shared Entrepreneurial ecosystems  or working out of a home-office to find out their views on the problem.

“No jhanjhat, only kaam fatafat” Annkur from Pricebaba quotes when asked about his experience, words which crisply summarize the Virtual office concept. Lots of small teams from upcoming start-ups come together under one roof to get a place to work.

Why? You ask?

The Pro’s of working from Virtual office:

 What about the Cons?

1) Sub-standard Internet Connectivity

2) Lack of Privacy. Sometimes there’s way too much noise and there is No Silent Room.

3) You can’t host customers in office

4) Shared offices mean shared birthdays, shared laughter sessions and shared sound space. One can easily get distracted and it’s difficult to discipline your employees.

5)Legality. Legally a virtual office facility can be tremendously painful, in case of a litigation. That risk would always exist.

Working at a home-cum-office seems to be slightly different in nature with Internet speeds being a major problem as well the restrictive environment which discourages growth. The Cloud seems to be successfully solving multiple problems and surprisingly more than 90% of the people we surveyed still continue to use Google Apps(Drive,Spreadsheets and Mail) to handle majority of their operational data. (Loads of potential for the CRM folks to tap in here).

Here are the 5 most Popular Apps used by people working out Virtual Offices & Home : -

1) Google Apps

2) Dropbox

3) Skype

4) Asana

5) Github

A lot of these folks have been using Exotel to virtually greet their customers and re-route the calls to their mobile phones also.:)

We at Exotel are thankful for their support and for spending time in sharing their experiences around shared/virtual/home offices.

What are the different kind of phone numbers available in India for businesses & entrepreneurs?

We often on chat, e-mails, calls get the immediate question from businesses/entrepreneurs that what kind of a phone number is available? It is still unclear, and the telecom operators especially in the business scenario do not explain this clearly on their portals either, so this is an attempt to demystify what are the kind of phone number options available today in India.

1. Land-line number

- No Incoming or Outgoing SMS (Outgoing SMS possible with some solutions like ours via a sender ID, but not on a normal land-line phone)
- Outbound Local & STD possible
- Inbound available
- Normal call rates charged for “consumer calling in” depending upon his/her plan
- Can be reached by any mobile or land-line phone from across India and the world
- Will be location specific (for Mumbai 022-21242124, for Delhi 011-21242124, for Chennai 044-21242124 etc. – an e.g. given below of Zivame and read their case study here)

2. Mobile Number without Incoming SMS (in a smart phone solution)

- Outgoing SMS & No Incoming SMS
- Outbound Local & STD possible
- Inbound available
- Normal call rates charged for “consumer calling in” depending upon his/her plan
- Can be reached by any mobile or land-line phone from across India and the world
- The Number series will be specific as per state (8088-919-888 is a Karnataka mobile number- example given below of Practo – also read their case study of how they use Exotel)
- Anyone outside Karnataka calling on a Karnataka mobile number has to dial with a “0″ or “+91″ and will be STD charge for them. Even a JustDial number is publicized with a “0″ because there is no mobile number which will be local charges for all Indian consumers.

3. Mobile Number with Incoming SMS (in a smart phone solution) (also called Long Code)

- Both Outgoing & Incoming SMS available
- Outbound Local & STD possible
- Inbound available
- Normal call rates charged for “consumer calling in” depending upon his/her plan
- Can be reached by any mobile or land-line phone from across India and the world
- This are special series numbers available via some specific operators, solution providers
- Some examples are 9243-396835 (Exotel for Food) and Groupon (click here to see their case study and number 9243-76-7666)

4. Mobile Number with Incoming SMS, but NO Call facility

- Both Outgoing and Incoming SMS possible
- No Outgoing/Outbound call possible, neither Inbound/Incoming calls possible

5. Toll Free Number (1-800-numbers)
We have covered this already in a detailed blog post here.

- No Outgoing nor Incoming SMS (Outgoing SMS possible with some solutions like ours via a sender ID, but not on a normal toll-free phone)
- No Outbound Calls
- Inbound/Incoming calls available
- Zero (0) call rates, i.e. the consumer calling in is not charged for the call, in-turn the call cost is paid by the organization owning the Toll-Free Number
- Can be reached by any mobile or land-line phone from across India only
- Provided by most solution providers, in the form of 1800-200-1611 (for EduDisha – read the case study) or for CA Club India one of our customers (1800-3000-0505 – see the below image)

6. International Toll Free Number

- No Outgoing nor Incoming SMS
- No Outbound Calls
- Inbound/Incoming calls available
- International customer of that Toll Free Number country will get a free call, i.e. if a Brazil Toll Free number is taken, then only Brazil residents will have a free “no charge” call.

7. Short Code is only for SMS – 55444 (Innoz Technologies – this is their Short code, we do not provide short codes, we are happy with what they are doing, and hence sharing this number)

- Outgoing & Incoming SMS both available
- No Outbound/Outgoing calls possible
- No Incoming/Inbound Calls possible
- Provided in the VAS space by some providers

8. Single Number Solutions
Is like a land-line number, but basically the same phone number is blocked across certain circles/states.
For example, how our customers JustEat, have 080-600-00-600 in Bangalore, and 022-600-00-600 in Mumbai) or our friends at Olacabs (see image below)

- No Outgoing, nor Incoming SMS available
- Outgoing Calls possible
- Incoming Calls possible
- Can be reached by any mobile or land-line phone from across India and the world
- This type of number costs a little higher and is available only with few select telecom operators, and the number is going down of availability because some of the numbers might already have been sold across circles to other customers and hence is difficult to bring, but still possible.

9. Toll Numbers (1860-numbers)
The only 1 major difference with a Toll Free Number is that on a Toll Number, the calls are charged at local rates for the “consumer” calling in to the Toll Number, rather than it being free. Rest all is same as Toll Free Numbers.

Which kind of phone number works for my business?

This is the million dollar question, only you can answer, but hopefully some examples below will help you make an easier decision.

Let me give some examples:
a) Land-line numbers are good for businesses who are local focused like a cab company such as Cabs4Hire or a restaurant serving hot food like Kaatizone in Bangalore (see image below-they are also our customers)

b) Mobile Number without Incoming SMS are good for any business not wanting SMS on their support, and have typically India-wide customers, who will call from anywhere and mostly, any location 25/26 states will be a STD call for the customer and does not matter much. E.g. an E-Commerce company
c) Mobile Number with Incoming SMS are for companies who would like their customers to SMS and call them on the same number, e.g. Groupon runs multiple campaigns on the number with special codes, and also receives calls on the same number.
d) Mobile Number with Incoming SMS but no Incoming calls is used by companies who want customers to SMS special offers and coupon codes to them, but not receive calls on these campaigns.
e) Toll Free Numbers are used by slightly large organizations such as Carwale, Godrej (in Exotel case) who can afford paying high call rates to subsidize for their end customer getting a free call. Also, companies dealing with children, special focused social groups use Toll Free numbers since their target market is poor and can not afford paying for call charges.
f) International Toll Free Numbers is used when any company has focus on a particular outside market, let’s assume USA, then you can buy a USA Toll Free Number, which will make it easy and free for USA residents to call on.
g) Short Code is used for running smart, short SMS campaigns and offers by many marketing & branding agencies.
h) Single Number Solutions are used by companies wanting to establish a Single Brand across all the cities in India, for example our customers JustEat have a Single Number Solution.
i) Toll Numbers are less frequently used, as their costing is same as Toll Free Numbers, and not many companies use this. It is slowly dying out.

What about fancy/vanity/special numbers?

Fancy, Vanity, Special numbers like 8880008888 (Shopperson) etc. are available at an extra premium price on all types of phone number options in India. It is typically the businesses decision on how much will it matter to have the number easy to remember. For someone like JustDial or JustEat it is important, but for us at Exotel, not that important.

We hope this post has helped you understand the A-Z of all types of phone numbers available in India, and you can take a better informed decision on what is right for your business.

We at Exotel, as of now provide Mobile/land-line/Toll-free numbers in India, and you can see the number options online in the product after signing up for a free trial. We also work across Telecom operators like Tata Docomo, Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL, MTNL, Reliance and sometimes are able to port your existing numbers with the Exotel system as well.

How does SMS work in India? What are the guidelines, rules and regulations for consumer and business SMS usage?

When you receive any SMS, many times instead of Sender’s Mobile no, you see something like LM-EXOTEL. You would surely have got used to these type of SMS from your bank, e-commerce companies etc. So, how are these SMS different from the SMS sent from your mobile? With below table, you will be very clear on this:

P2P SMS(Person-to-Person SMS)	A2P SMS( Application-to-Person SMS)
SMS from Mobile to Mobile. E.g, sending out an SMS from one mobile no. to another	SMS from an Application to Mobile. E.g, Sending out an SMS via Exotel (Any service provider like SMS Gupshup, ValueFirst etc.) dashboard, or application.
Sender’s Mobile no. is displayed on receivers Mobile	SenderID instead of Mobile no. shown at receiver’s end.A 6 character Sender ID like LM-JABONG for transactional SMS and LM-012345 for Promotional.Read below for more on Sender IDs, and for further classification of Transactional & promotional SMS, read this
You can reply back to the same number	You can not reply back to the Sender-ID
You can not make out the sender unless that sender’s no is stored in mobile or you have TrueCaller application and are willing to let your contact base go to the entire world	Great Branding Opportunity for Companies
All SMS sent through it are deemed transactional	2 categories of SMS:Transactional & Promotional SMS
May have different rates for Local & STD SMSs	Same rate across India
SMS recharge packs available from your operator, or online via sites like Paytm, Freecharge etc.	For a business, there will be some fixed charges for Transactional and Promotional and if you take the service from us – the pricing is here.
With TRAI’s THE TELECOM COMMERCIAL COMMUNICATIONS CUSTOMER and PREFERENCE (EIGHTH AMENDMENT) REGULATIONS 2011, operators can provide SMS packs for max of only 200 SMS per SIM per Day. After that its has to be mandatory charged at minimum Rs 0.5/SMS	No SMS limit or rate difference on no. of SMS to be sent from service provider (or if you use us, you use until your Exotel balance runs out )
Special rates for Blackout days(Diwali, New Year etc. when Whatsapp and Hike become the tune for the day for spam)	No special rates on Blackout days needed

So, when does sending SMS through my phone becomes not scalable for your business?

As already mentioned, after 200 SMS on concessional rates, you are going to be charged at least 50p/SMS on SMS via mobile. Also, the pain of selecting the contacts from address book via Mobile or connection manager is too cumbersome.

We would anytime suggest your business needs to send more than 50 SMS per day, to start using a service provider, be it us or anyone else, for some of the following reasons (and we will be a bit biased in speaking about our features):

a) Use Exotel’s list feature for sending out SMS. Use Exotel’s customized reports to calculate the ROI.

b) The time you spend on selecting contacts via phone is saved totally and same list can be reused as and when required.

Also, all A2P SMS are sent through a Sender ID. So, what are these Sender ID’s. How does it give a branding opportunity?

Every time you take out cash from your ATM, an instant SMS from LM-HDFCBK/VM-HDFCBK comes to your mobile. It gives instant recognition to a brand’s communication.

A Sender ID is 6 character Identity of the Sender for all A2P SMS. A typical SenderID would like LM-XXXXXX. TRAI has categoried A2P SMS in 2 types : Transactional & Promotional. SenderIDs for both differs.

Transactional SenderIDs  are 6 character alphabetic SenderID like LM- CITIBK, LM-GOOGLE.

Do’s & Do not’s :

1. Special Characters like dot(.),comma(,),hypen(-),underscore(_) etc are not allowed.
2. Transactional SenderIDs should be in uppercase alphabets only.
3. SenderID should resemble only your company name.
4. Should not try to impersonate any celebrity/company name.

Promotional SenderIDs :6 Digit Numeric SenderIDs in format LM-XYYYY like LM-012345.

Do’s & Do not’s :

1. The last 5 numbers are specifically allocated to a registered Telemarketer by Operator.
2. Only Numerical characters allowed.
3. The First digit X refers to the category for which promotional SMS belongs to. For Eg, if I am a travel company, then ideally, the SMS should be sent through SenderID LM-712345.

How Exotel (or any service provider) help your company with SenderIDs? :

You can get your company specific Sender ID when you purchase a number via Exotel or from any SMS operator you might use. For e.g, if you are running a company say E-sports Pvt ltd, then for sending an SMS to your customer by choosing a specific Sender ID such as “LM-ESPORT”. All your outgoing SMS will then go through the Sender ID “LM-ESPORT”.

With all the above info, you must be wondering what does LM stand for in A2P SMS?

As per by TRAI Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Sixth Amendment) Regulations, 2011, effective from 27^th Sept 2011, all A2P SMSs have to be sent in format of XY-ABCDEF where X is Operator’s code & Y – Region code.

Below table shows the common Operator codes & Region codes :

Major SMS Gateway Providers in India are Loop, Aircel, Vodafone,TATA, BSNL and MTNL.

Location wise, majority of A2P SMS originates from Mumbai or Delhi circle as Operators they have done their SMSC setup their.

So next time an SMS comes to you, you can easily make out from where & which operator the A2P SMS is sent via.

Hope reading this was informative and makes your life a bit less complicated?

Tools for Survey, both offline & online in India

Before we dive-in, do read how surveys are mostly done by outsourced agencies (in this case in-house for Dilbert, and his HR team.) Please click on the image, enlarge it and read it.

We recently came across one of our customers running a gigantic survey, and they were struggling to find the best way to do a good survey with existing tools available in the market. They wanted to get to know the “Pulse” of their consumers directly, and were not interested in outsourcing this to a 3rd party data collection, or market research firm. It was great to see a fairly well reputed organization trying to understand their consumers themselves, and hence an honest search started with them to find the right products and tools to help them with the survey.

This is how we/they tackled it:

1. They focussed on “Why” they were conducting a market survey-cum-research, and some of the basic reasons for most companies are:
- To collect data points
- To mobilize people towards a single objective point
- learn from existing behavior and clients/customers
- get feedback from customers

2. Once, they figured the “Why”, the focus was on “What is the Goal” of the survey, a single mission point:
- They nailed it to finding whether X is something is interested in.

3. Goal nailed, next target was defining the audience, segmenting them and understanding where they reside, and what would be the easiest way to reach out to them:
- This was a study around Indian consumers, which meant not only Urban, but also Rural India, and this was concerning, because getting real data was difficult, apart from the government reports (which are great) being readily available.

4. What “Tools” to use, so that “real data is reported” and measurable from the start. This brings us to a good discussion around what can an Indian company focussing on doing a survey, market research, data collection use to capture information from across Indian users, both Urban & Rural, we did a lot of research ourselves and came down to the following types and tools:

Pull & Push techniques and/or In-site & Off-Site tools-

If your audience is online, there are a few very good tools you can use to engage with existing audiences (smartly) from your website, social networks and e-mail push surveys, and if your audience is offline, there are ways to tackle this as well.

Online:

1. WebEngage (A #madeinIndia SaaS Product) and as Avlesh puts it has mastered the art of running “Context based targeted surveys”, and this gives companies with good traffic or any traffic to ask the right questions, to the right people.

2. Survey Monkey is a popular tool, and is used by many companies and organizations for its ease of use and setup. This product allows you to setup a simple questionnaire and now reach out to a set of e-mail database you will have of your existing users/consumers or customers.

(this helps cover your online traffic and there are more tools possible, with many more suggestions of online tools, but I would say with these 2 you are covered well)

Social:

3. Engaging people on Social Media channels is a great way to also collect data, and there are some successful experiments on twitter, Linkedin and Facebook and in most of these social networks, you can embed the above online tools also to engage with them.

In a country like India, the Offline & Mobile will be also very important:

Offline:

4. Exotel! – A lot of India is on mobile, but might not have complete access to Internet, and this was the case with our customer, so they decided to use 2-3 applications within Exotel such as

a. SMS (Outgoing and Incoming), sending a simple blast out, and also asking them to respond either on the website or via an SMS reply to an Incoming SMS enabled phone number.

b. Also, they utilized the push IVR Voice services to call people in rural areas within their own language, and this made it easy for them to leave a 1 (Yes) or 2 (No) answer over the phone itself, and it was an incoming call.

c. Missed Call to register for the survey and support the goal.

5. Offline kiosks, feet-on-street and data survey collection agencies – since I/we have no personal references here in this space, if any of you do come across any reliable, good one’s, please do share.

Mobile:

6. Touchmetric is a great mobile based survey tool you can use to reach out to internet mobile users in India, and conduct quick surveys via this product.

7. Mobile-ad networks such as Google, InMobi have plans for large people to utilize their mobile ad-network programs as well, and reach out to custom audiences on the right devices, in the right region, and if you have more concise data on your user, then even further!

Do let us know what else has worked for you/your company in the Indian context, and we would love to try it out, and share it with our existing users.

Most importantly – why we insist on using tools, is so that you can “track” digitally, and not have to go through a painful process of fighting over a pile of useless forms, and not make it difficult for your end consumer either.

Also, if you are an NGO, or any organization looking for quick free tools, check out this link

A very crisp small post on a question regularly asked by many companies targeting urban/metro or tier 1 city customers who are on mobile phones.

As per TRAI guidelines, if a mobile number is registered on the Do-Not-Call registry, then only Transactional SMS or Transactional Calls can/should be made to these customers. We have explained in a few posts around Promotional/Tele-Marketing guidelines and SMS Guidelines of what should be and can be done.

Then, the natural question is how many people in these focus cities (Major 6) are on DND? We don’t have absolute data, but we have a large database of consumers interacting to/from our customers via calls & SMS, and the data states that around 45% of people in India’s top 6 cities are on DND. (There were few more statistics from our E-Commerce: Who’s calling in – Statistics)

This means, you can reach out to 55% of these phone numbers via a normal call, and a Promotional SMS will also reach them, but the other 45% should not be disturbed.

Let us know if you think there is some more statistics that could help your business, and we will try figuring it out.

We are in the midst of the mayhem going around a single emergency number. TRAI is talking about drafting a proposal and we guess it will be couple of years before we see light of this number in India. But, why? Don’t we need a good easy to remember single universal number for our country?

Different countries around the world has single digit emergency numbers like 911 in USA, 999 in UK and 000 in Australia. A secondary emergency response number also exists in some countries e.g. 112 in UK (in addition to 999), 112 in Australia (in addition to 000). Calls from this number are again routed to primary response numbers in these countries. In India currently we have more than 10 emergency numbers for various reasons. Given below is the guide to all the emergency numbers:

Shortcomings of our current system:

Currently when a call is made to an emergency number the location information is always taken from the caller and the emergency helping unit rely heavily on this information. In this situation, if the caller fails to convey his location or location conveyed by him is vague or erroneous then this request may be forwarded to a unit which is not in the vicinity and as a result crucial time is lost.

The second major issue here is of jurisdiction which occurs due to lack of location of the caller. Many calls land on Police Control that may not have jurisdiction at the location of the caller. For instance, if a distress call is made at the border of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, when the caller is entering Madhya Pradesh, it is likely that the call lands at the control room located in the a town in Maharashtra, while the nearest help can be provided from a town located in Madhya Pradesh and if the control rooms do not have back-end facility to pass calls and information gathered, the response to the caller will be delayed.

Third issue here is to remember a laundry list of these numbers mentioned above. Also in some distress situation when multiple agencies are required to act. Each one of them have to be called individually and you end up explaining the situation to all of them which leads to loss of time where instant response is required.

How do we solve these problems ? Or what is stopping us from solving these problems ?

Operators and Governance are the major hurdles to implement this.

Operators:

1. In order for the Operators to implement this, they will need to invest in some infrastructure (for location based services). All these operators are already incurring losses because of the license fee and competition. They have no incentive to upgrade their infrastructure. Also co-ordinating with over 10 operators is going to take some time.
2. Another challenge would be how to enable calling Emergency number from an inactive or suspended sim card.
3. Each operator needs to maintain and share the database of its subscribers with location and when an emergency call is originated they need to pin point this location and share it with the operator who manages the emergency number which is MTNL/BSNL in India. Operators will have to maintain a database of current location of every connection they sell.

Governance:

1. Government internally does not have proper co-ordination between all the emergency agencies. Now if they are planning to merge them they need to co-ordinate with all the agencies like police, fire, ambulance and have a dedicated trained staff to have knowledge about all these services.
2. Government needs to decide what services to include and what not to include. Also the scale at which they want to do this. Do we have the infrastructure to support such a service even in the remote corner of this country? I hope yes, else implementing this will take even longer
3. Which department will be in charge and who will drive this initiative? Who will bear the cost? Central or State governments.

All above questions need to be answered. So I don’t know when we will have this service but I wish it is some time in the near future.

Exotel has now added its 6th telecom circle and state to its existing list of operations. We now will be able to provide local mobile, land-line and toll free phone numbers from the rising state of Gujarat.

We already have some existing customers (Dream Holidays Online, Expert Mind, G-Auto and more) in the state, and will be more than happy to start solving many more problems of business owners, entrepreneurs, SMEs in this developing and technology open state.

Please feel free to create a trial account by clicking on this link, and then choose your Gujarat number options to buy a virtual phone number for your business. You can also port your existing phone number to use it with Exotel, and we can help you on that, after you create a trial account.

Gujarat is the 6th state (telecom circle) we enter after Karnataka, Maharashtra, NCR/Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh being the first 5.

As they say, “Gujarat maa aapnu swaagat che”. (Welcome to Gujarat)

After the huge success of our notification feature on Exotel Dashboard, we thought “Why not bring this feature onto mobiles using our Exotel Mobile app?”. When we first released Exotel Mobile, the first feature request we received from customers like Kiran Jonnalagadda and Nandini (Urbanladder) was that they would like to know the customer who is calling before attending the call. So, answering all such requests, here we are with a major update to our Exotel Mobile android app, a notification feature that will let you know your customer before you receive his/her call. This feature furthers the reason of the the Exotel app’s existence –  To provide true mobility to your customer support agents. Now, you can get to know your customer details on your android phone along with your Exotel dashboard. Every time your device is getting a call, you will get a notification, for example, “You are getting a call from Bhargav (09848022338)”. Using this info, you can now wow your customer by greeting them with their name.

What should I do to get this feature?

All you need to do is to ensure that you have the latest version of our mobile app installed. To do this, follow this link on your mobile phone. Choose “Google Play” as the app to open this link. Install this app, if you haven’t installed it till now.  Alternately you can search for ‘exotel’ in the Google play store. Open the app, once the update/install is complete. Ta Da! Your Exotel Mobile is now equipped with notification features. Opening the app after updating is important.

How do I make good use of this new feature?

We were also asked that it would be great to know a small list of notifications agents received. So we changed our homescreen of app to now have 10 recent notifications. Clicking on any one such notification will initiate a call to that particular customer.

Likewise, we have also provided a widget. Add this widget on your homescreen and you will get a list of recent notifications on the widget too. As above, click on one such notification and a call will be initiated to that customer.

Also, keep your address book as updated as possible and you can read more on that.

Or how in Exotel, Sales learnt to embrace Technology.

Allow me to start off with a disclaimer. Most earlier posts in Exotel were written by people who knew what they were doing. This post is more an account of a tech-centric approach to handling Sales in a relatively new industry. It’s the story of how we brought down the sales cycle from 90 days to 3 days.

Before we talk of the technologies involved, I thought it will be a good idea to set some context. Technology is not the panacea to the world problems.

Technology ain’t no panacea

It worked for us after getting a clear understanding of the following:

Clearly define where your job begins and where it ends.

Where does marketing end and sales begin? There were too many definitions out there, and honestly, most of them didn’t make sense to us. We went ahead and defined our own terms. Interest Generation involves precisely that- generating interest ad getting the clients to sign up for the free trial. Conversion involves starting off with a signed-up customer and get the person to buy the product.

In other words, Interest Generation is introducing the client to the product, and Conversion seeks to convert the product to revenues. This definition made the most sense to us, and we stuck to this. In the post, we talk about Conversion.

Identify your customer type

This was the toughest nut to crack. Every investor (be it Anil from Mumbai Angels or Karthik from Blume), or sales advisor (Mukund Mohan) and mentor(Sharad Sharma) spoke of the product-market fit. Very early in the game, we thought we would figure this PMF (Product-market-fit) beast and the 3 to 20 member teams, receiving more than 50 calls per day, in the B2C space. Alright, that’s cool, we said. We have the product-market-fit, and then we clicked our heels together, but we weren’t in Oz yet.

That is because there was one crucial bit that we were missing – the PMF should work well with your (our) channel of delivery. In clear terms, channel of delivery is the predominant channel on which your consumers communicate with your company. I have taken the liberty to redefine some of the standard terminology to reflect our needs.

• Strategic Conversion

The likes of HP-Intel collaboration.(Do we have an Indian example?)
This involves multi-million-dollar strategic partnerships and we are not touching that with a ten-meter long pole

• Consultative conversion

This constitutes the bulk of B2B conversions in India. Standard enterprise sales along the lines of tel-cos, medial representatives, etc. Businesses typically adopts a tele-sales ;inside sales + feet on the street (FOS) model for conversion, and the delivery channel is largely offline.

To the extent that LTV exceeds your CAC, you have a viable business. We walked this path for six months, before realizing the unit economics did not add up, and we moved to a transactional conversion model. That, and at the current stage of Exotel, scaling conversion by hiring person after person, and scaling linearly did not appeal to us. I wonder how our competitors work this out to build a sustainable business.

• Transactional conversion

In India, customers lead to long sales cycles, they said. They make you meet them multiple times, negotiating ad-infinitum and expect perks, they said. Transactional conversion won’t work, they said.

While this might be true for Consultative conversion, it’s not necessarily true for Transactional conversion. These are merely the effects. The cause is deeper than that.

The equation for a good sale is to match customer’s investment, in terms of time and effort. With consultative conversion, “consultation” is manual effort. You can’t automate it.

OTOH, in transactional conversion, technology offers a lot of scope in matching and complementing customer’s investment in your product. Part – II of this blog post will be about how technology help us complement our customer’s investment in Exotel and reduce our SaaS sales cycle from 90 days to 3 days, that post is out early next week.

There are a few metrics that an SME needs to measure to gauge the health of the company as well as get insights for better decision making. As always, there are some metrics that matter and some that don’t.

Metrics matter

 

Agent wise Calls

Capturing such details for a call becomes easy if one is using a smart telephony system like Exotel. Read more about Exotel’s reporting and Analytics features here.

Insights from the metrics

Here are some of the insights that you can draw from measuring the above mentioned metrics.

At Exotel, as a company we realize that as vendors and service providers to businesses who are looking to reach out to their customers or potential customers over calls/Voice or SMS, we play a crucial role in stopping spam from plagarising the Indian consumer’s phone number.

Few months post launch, we took strict actions to make sure we would not allow our customers to make un-solicited calls or SMS to consumers who are registered on the DND Directory. That led to us, losing some business, but we felt it was the right and correct decision. We ourselves are consumers and would not personally like promotional calls from a Transactional line, even though we are on DND directory.

We came across an interesting question on Quora that asked “What should India do to stop spamming?”, and we answered it in the way we thought, but that was not enough, and as a vendor, we had to take a bigger stand.

A stand that led the way and set a precedent so that things like this stop happening.

Then, we came across a very enterprising young techie from Delhi, who has been building an android application called “India Against Spam” which allows you to report calls and SMS which are promotional in nature to the registered offices in your circles and TRAI. Deepak Jharodia works post work timings, and develops this application for the Indian consumer, just like you and me. He is an incredibly inspiring open source enthusiast and toils time away when not working for his company, for the common good.

We at Exotel loved the application, the person, and the idea behind it, and with our motto of also preventing spam, we have decided to tie-up with Deepak and help spread the word on the application and also support it with our Exotel team.

The Exotel Android application will also have the “India against Spam” button to report spam cases, and we will work together to stop spam in India.

We hope all of you join this movement in your bit, and start reporting more of these spam calls, to stop vendors and service providers providing an option to businesses to do spam.

How to avoid frustrating your customers calling into your call center or support number

We as consumers, call into call centers all the time, and are frustrated by a lot of inefficiencies in a typical call center (small or big) setup, so we decided to list down the 5 most frustrating problems of a call center:

1. You call and are explaining your situation/problem, and the call disconnects after a few minutes due to bad network. When you call back, you have to re-explain yourself all over again!

2. You call for the 2nd time into a company/restaurant/agency and they ask you for your number and name again?

3. The number is busy, like really, that should not even be allowed in this day and age, right?

4. The IVR which asks dumb questions and takes you to no man’s land.

5. They tell you they will get back, but they never do?

What’s your score on having faced these issues on a score of 1 to 5 ? Drop it on the comments tab.

Within Exotel we found 3.8 was the average score

There are some ways to improve upon this:

1. Sticky Agent is a feature in some smart solutions like ours , which makes sure the call connects with the last person spoken to.

2. Most “good call center” operation teams have this, and so do we for folks who can’t spend on call center operations with a really nice feature called the “Know your caller“.

3. There are couple of ways to solve this:
a. If you don’t have a business phone solution, you can quickly use a product like ours and setup redirects to both mobile phones and landlines.
b. If you have a good call center in place, make sure if everyone is busy, you queue the caller, so he/she is aware.
c. Or, just send the person into a voicemail and promise to get back to them, and do, else it is a waste of time.

4. If you want to automate and reduce man power transferring calls between the right teams, just setup a good IVR which asks for their information and from then on, ideally do a CRM or ERP integration with your telephony service so you know the caller before he calls, and what might be the context, rather than swinging him through the same IVR again and again.

5. Ideally, have a ticketing mechanism on the back-end, and send a Customer Reference no. via SMS or/and e-mail with which they can track the ticket raised.

We would love to hear of any more irritating things that happen in a typical call center environment to consumers, and we would try providing solutions to that to our customers.

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

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.