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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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

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

“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.

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.

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!

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).

We would get asked a bunch of times a few questions on how does this work? So, we made a very simple nice 1 minute video which explains how Cloud telephony can work in India.

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.

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.

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.

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?

We at Exotel are in the business of selling Smart Phone numbers. The ideology comes from Shivku’s impromptu answer to a question(Question being :- “What’s the future of Cloud Telephony?”) during a conference.

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?

This Monday, opened up to a beautiful sunny morning and the news of the JustDial’s IPO breaking in to confirm the rumours. JustDial has indeed conquered the Indian SME Market helping businesses get found – from Mumbai to Manipur , from Srinagar to Sivakasi.

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?

Chat with the Experts, a new series on the Exotel blog in which we speak to industry experts across various domains and try to understand consumer pain points and how technology is or isn’t solving them. As a part of this series, we spoke to Anaggh Desai, a veteran in the hospitality, e-commerce, travel, and retail industries. You should follow him on twitter here

We asked Anaggh to talk about how as a consumer technology can improve the interactions with its supplier (the Retailer, Restauranteur) and also how being on the other side of the table, what more improvements are needed in the mindset of business owners and retailers.

Q.1. You have been in the Internet, and offline business for the past 20+ years, what is the biggest change you have seen in technology adoption amongst retailers and restaurants in India?

A.1. The simplest accepted change is in basic accounting and POS in the front. Unfortunately, most have still not integrated both.

Q.2. As a consumer, what are some pain points well solved by technology (assume net banking or eCommerce) in other sectors that you wish were implemented by both service providers and retailers/restaurants?

A.2. I’m afraid both assumptions are wrong and they have a long way to go, and it would be to the benefit of other sectors not to follow them.

The simple alleviation of ‘Pain Point’ is Listen, understand, don’t ask the customer to repeat the entire story again (when you are taping the call for Quality purposes, please listen), respond within acceptable time frame, learn, do not repeat.

Q.3. How do you think today’s entrepreneur and business owner in these sectors (retail and restaurants) should look at technology? Is it a means to lead generation, cost reduction, efficiency? What has he/she before looked at technology and how should it change?

A.3. Technology is not a Capital Investment alone and hence should not be treated as such. All the three points will follow once your objective is clear. – Do you want to listen, interact, learn from your customer? In which case technology will help you initiate that, followed by lead generation, which should lead to increase in productivity thereby efficiency, cost reduction maybe, but wouldn’t really push that but definitely ROI sooner or later.

Q.4. What are some technology adoption examples you can share from your recent times that stand out or should be adopted by more?

A.4. Loyalty programs where cards are not required but just an identification number is something that is extremely convenient, but there are no aggregators as yet. This should further extend to even hotel cards being app or phone driven.

At least some brands using technology for Data mining, insights, analytics and actually deriving ROI from it. Again this needs to spread and be implemented across many brands.

Q.5 Any piece of advice to young entrepreneurs trying to bring technology to help retailers and restaurants run their business better?

A.5. Learn to ask your customers “What is your pain area?” and then have solutions for those pain points; probability of loyalty is high

Thanks a lot, Anaggh for agreeing to do this interview.

We had the opportunity to get in touch with Uttam Pegu, an IVRS (Interactive Voice Response system) expert from India, who has been in the space for a long time and has seen it evolve, he talks to us about how the IVR landscape in India has changed and what further is possible.

Q. How has IVR technology evolved over the last 4-5 years in India especially, what were the use-cases earlier and now, are they different for businesses?

A. According to me, IVR has seen two major changes in the last 4/5 years. Initially, IVR was just on premise telephony with solutions in India majorly used by Railways, BSNL etc. Then suddenly, IVR became voice based VAS (Value Added Service) for the mobile phone industry and became to be known as voice portals.

CRBT (Caller Ring back tone), which is nothing but an smartly packaged IVR, generated huge revenue for mobile companies as well as VAS companies. But around 2010, with decline of VAS industry, cloud telephony or hosted IVR has become new buzz in Indian IVR industry. With cloud IVR or hosted IVR services, IVR has suddenly become affordable by everyone as the initial cost for CTI cards, customised IVR Software development disappeared.

Q. What according to you will be a key differentiation for businesses in the IVR, Telephony space be as time grows and in the Indian Market?

A. I think telephony infrstructure and innovative voice application will be the key differentiation in IVR industry. We might see some consolidation among Cloud Telephony providers in near future. Some companies may become just platform providers while some might start giving voice application for end users using those platform. Also, some foreign IVR players may enter into Indian market in big way once VOIP – PSTN connectivity is legalised in India.

Q. What has kept you attached to this field (i.e Interactive Voice Response systems and Telephony) for such a long time, any personal story behind it?

A. I could not find any other industry as exciting as IVR in last few years, honestly! IVR is still a small industry and I do not think it has grown to its full potential yet. Thanks to the Mobile Phone revolution in India, it has witnessed a rapid increase in telephony density, but it has also become the cheapest telecom market in terms of voice usage. Who could think about simple ‘Missed Call’ to become a powerful message exchange (it is being used for voting, survey etc.) system.

Personally, being in this IVR industry, I could afford to have enough free time for myself to continue my hobby of Wild Life Photography! I also thank few Indian IVR companies being kind enough to sponsor couple of high end lenses for my hobby!

Q. What are some ways you think businesses are still not using IVR, but should, some examples from every day life?

A. IVR is actually as essential as a website is for a business. Every business which has a website, must have IVR too. Most of the time, I feel, many business houses own website just because everyone else is also having one, without knowing or realising the actual benefit of a website. A website is accessible by anyone from anywhere in the world which virtually keeps the business open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Similarly, IVR works as telephone receptionist, a very smart one, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Consider about a situation, when a visitor from USA visits an website of Indian company that lists a telephone number. The visitor dials that number and it rings out without any response and worst part is, the business that owns that website will never know, someone called them when they were closed! Just like a website can store messages for a business house, an IVR can also store voice messages (voice-mail). IVR can be even more interactive than email with integration of SMS. Those businesses who are not using IVR, are losing many prospective clients daily.

We would like to thank Uttam for taking out time and speaking to us

New Update on TRAI Guidelines for SMS operations

TRAI has finally come up with new regulations to curb SMS issues between operators.
This guideline will bring regulation in the unorganized SMS market.

The guidelines issued by TRAI applicable from June 1,2013 are given below
1. SMS termination charge of 2 paise applicable across networks.
2. Currently only promotional SMS were charged termination cost of 5 paise. Now after the implementation of new regulation, Transactional, Promotional as well as Normal SMS will be charged a termination cost of 5 paise.

Termination charge is paid by the carrier on which the SMS or call originated to the carrier whose subscriber it is delivered. Without any termination charge, the carrier on whose network the SMS terminated would get nothing and yet is expected to deliver the message using its resources.
Overall, the SMS termination cost now will be ~7 paise.

Why did TRAI bring about this change ?
As per TRAI, small operators were selling bulk SMS to telemarketers at very low rates and the revenue earned by them was because of the large volume of Transactional and Promotional SMS sent to subscribers of other network with out having to pay Termination Charge.

For example- An e-commerce company sending an SMS alert regarding some discount offer to its existing customer as a Transactional SMS can escape the termination charge of 5 paise as per the old regulation. The content and nature of the SMS is promotional but still companies continued to send it via the Transactional route to save on the 5 paise termination charge on promotional SMS.

How will this impact Businesses who send out these SMS’s?
With these new regulations the cost of a Transactional and Promotional SMS will be almost the same. Also the prices of SMS have increased in the past 6 months to make up for the decline in revenue due to reduction in SMS volume across all Operators.
We feel that operators might not immediately pass on the cost benefit to companies, they will evaluate the SMS volume and then bring about the pricing change.

We will keep you updated in case of any SMS pricing change. We do not rule out a drop in SMS prices in the near future

Also – if you get bugged by continuous spam calls & SMS – use our partner “India Against Spam”

There are numerous enterprises which advertise their number via newspaper, bill boards etc. We have come across several people who ask – ‘How can I use Exotel with my publicised number?’

The answer to this query lies in following video – take a look.

Call forwarding is a facility which is provided by every telecom operator in India. There are three types of call forwarding activations:

1)    Immediate Call Divert

2)    Call Divert on busy

3)    Call Divert on no reply

To use your number with Exotel you have to activate Immediate Call Divert. This will divert all the calls landing on your phone number to Exotel Number. Activation of this facility is generally free and charges are equivalent to one outgoing call, which is operator dependent.

Following table gives the procedure and charges for major telecom operators in India.

Mobile Numbers

SNo	Operator	How to do	Charges	Link
1		What is Call Divert / Forwarding Ans. Call Divert is the facility with which you can divert the incoming calls (based on options selected by you in your handset settings) to any local number. Each diverted call if answered shall be charged as per applicable outgoing rates.How can I activate it?Ans. This is a handset depended feature and has to be activated or deactivated through the handset settings	All diverted calls are billed as per the outgoing call rates of your plan	Airtel Website
2		You can now divert important calls to another Vodafone mobile phone or landline if you are unable to take a call in case: you miss a call, are busy, are out of reach or phone switched off Activate / Deactivate Call forward Charges	You will not be charged for activation or deactivation of this service. Only the call divert will be charged as a separate call.	Vodafone Call Divert
3		Call Divert is available in the following configurations Immediate call divert (unconditional): All incoming calls are diverted to the number you choose. Call-divert-busy-divert: Calls are diverted only when you are busy on another call. Not-reachable-No-reply divert: Calls are diverted only when your mobile is off or out of coverage, if its battery is down, or if you do not reply within a specified time (say within 60 seconds). Call-divert-default: When Call Divert is activated, but the Not-reachable-No-reply feature is not activated, incoming calls will be diverted to your Voicemail box.	Refer to link.	Reliance Call Divert
4		Using the menu function, you can activate the call forwarding facility for the following four options: All calls If busy If no reply If not reachable/switched off	Refer to link.	BSNL Knowledgebase
5		Forward incoming calls to another mobile phone or office, home, or other phone that has been registered in advance. This ensures you do not miss important calls even when you are in a location with no reception or the when power is off.	Refer to link.	Tata Docomo help
6		Start Using call divert / call forwardUse the menu functions of your phone to activate call divert / call forward for the following options: All Calls If Busy If no reply If not reachable/switched off	Call Forwarding Charges applicable are as per base tariff of respective tariff plans	Aircel Call Forwarding

Landline numbers

SNo	Operator	How to do	Charges	Link
1		Dial 114 followed by the telephone number for which the call is to be transferred. He will get the acceptance tone.Dial 115 and wait for acceptance tone.	Refer to the link	BSNL Landline Services
2		Refer to the link	Refer to the link	Airtel Fixed Line Call Forwading
3		Refer to the link	Refer to the link	RCOM Postpaid Call Forwarding

We are in the business of selling telephony solutions right? So our market base extends from across sectors (SME, MSME’s in India) and we get an opportunity to talk to a lot of businesses, owners, technology consultants and many more when helping them setup Exotel as their Cloud Telephony solution and some of our interactions have been worth not only a laugh, but also worth the customer behaviour change we all SaaS companies in India must and should do. After-all, Chacha Chaudry’s brain also worked faster than a computers

Some interesting conversations we have had with some customers:

1. Customer asks in Hindi “API kya hota hai?” (in English: What is API?) and then our team mate Ajay Bhise answers – “API woh hai jisse aapka software aur humara software baat karte hain” (in English: API is that feature which helps your and our software talk to each other)

2. We called up a customer who was interested in the product, and in the middle of the conversation after listening and clarifying his questions he says the following “Call me tomorrow, I am in Jail right now” , this got a lot of rolling over the floor, because Shubham luckily did not have to hear, come now to this Jail and discuss there

3. A customer asked me how do I try your product, can someone come and meet me, and we don’t have a policy of visiting customers with a small 13-15 member team, so I told him to do it online. He was pretty taken aback and would say, but How? I convinced him to try installing Skype or Team-Viewer, these are softwares which helps in screen sharing and he went ahead and did it.

After a late-night demo with my team-mate, he called me in the morning and said “Bahut pasand aaya product or software”, (I really enjoyed the product and software), so then I said, “Great, why don’t you try it for a few days and make some calls.”, So his response was “arre nahi, I liked Skype a lot, kaafi maza aaya” (No, I meant I liked Skype a lot).

I was baffled, but it was interesting, after a few days he did decide to buy Exotel and mentioned how he wants someone to pick up the cheque from his office.

So, I suggested why not try online, and he was not sure of the process, so we educated him again with a carrot that if he learnt this net-banking, he could buy his wife or children products via Flipkart too!

The Flipkart Carrot

He actually did go ahead, and buy the product (Exotel) online, and eventually called me to tell me he bought some stuff for his wife and children online from Flipkart too.

All in all I think it is a delightful experience selling SaaS in India, and the rate at which internet is penetrating with the advancement of net banking, movie ticketing, e-commerce, it has helped open the mind-set of the Indian businessman who is also an Indian consumer

With all of us SaaS companies trying to help our bit, I think it is important we educate and spend more time in helping these prospective customers understand the value of being online as well. Help them use the products in a DIY (Do-it-yourself) model, which benefits everyone, including the customer (who is now less dependent on someone else to use his/her software, and is also now more confident of himself because he can handle a new software).

I recently never knew how important a phone number is when it comes to building trust for a 1st time online buyer. My mother, who is now also on Quora and Twitter apart from Facebook, was buying something on UrbanLadder recently and she read through the entire description, reviews, details, specifications and contacted the mattress person as well as per specifications from their numbers, but she still had a doubt.

A simple doubt, if they could send the item at the day she wants. She saw the phone number next to buy now, and she called it. It helped her calm her fears, and spoke to someone for less than a minute, but there she was more confident of that she will get the order when she wants.

It is surprising how sometimes in an attempt to get the customer to do it yourself all the time, we forget to put a phone number close to where the queries and the mind is most in doubt.

I suggested this to a few more e-commerce companies, and they have seen over 70% order check out confirmations, because this new age e-commerce buyer before starting to trust your brand and become a LTV customer, needs a simple telephone call helping hand. I know Flipkart does not do it, but to the 2-3 companies I suggested this, and who have, they have seen much greater conversions over telephone orders of someone who is helping them cross the line, in making the purchase.

Try it for your E-Commerce business today, I think it will build trust, and get you more order conversions easily. The visibility of the phone number right next to the Buy Now, makes a huge difference on every order item. Simple product manager or marketing website hack actually in coordination with your support team.

With a lot of new entrants entering the cloud telephony space, it’s natural to be confused about which product to subscribe to. With one year of working with Exotel, I’ve noticed numerous people asking questions about how to go about choosing a particular product.  Here are the top 5 things to keep in mind before making a decision :-

1) The Cost

You know this makes a big difference to you! To clear some air, Cloud Telephony is considerably more expensive than your normal mobile phone. These solutions are usually built on cutting-edge technology and operate in a slightly different way. Incoming calls are a cost to the service provider, Outgoing Calls are 2 calls. The advantage of going with Cloud Telephony is primarily saving up on the tons of money you would’ve shelled out to re-create such a system(using PRI lines/EPABX) yourself. A few questions to understand this would be :-

Q. How many calls do you get?

-> If you’re receiving way too less calls(less than 30 a day), you’re probably not going to derive a lot of value from the system as a pure calling solution.

-> If you’re receiving way too many calls(more than 2000 a day), you might be better off buying a PRI line/EPABX system of your own. It’ll work out cheaper and you can probably get a customized solution at your own premise.

There are obviously exceptions, but more than 80% of the people who fall under this category are ideally going to find a cloud telephony solution expensive. So think about how valuable your calls are to you and gauge the price of the solution accordingly.

Q. How much business(in money) does every call bring?

If your opportunity cost of the call is very less(Rs. 50), then it’s probably not worth the effort, if it’s anywhere greater, then you probably should look into getting a better phone system.

Lock-In -> Being a subscription based system, there are lock-ins involved, ranging from a month to almost a year. Do keep in mind how long your operations are going to last. Enquiring about flexibility with respect to phone numbers and other services will give you a good idea about what the lock-in brings for you – both good and bad.

2) The Number

One of the biggest value propositions of Cloud Telephony is having a SINGLE number for your business. The trick is to choose the right kind of number depending on your setup.

Location -> If you’re running a Movers and Packers business in Jaipur, it probably doesn’t make sense for you to buy a Delhi Landline number. If you’re alright with Mobile Numbers, that’ll open you up to a lot of possibilities. Also, Outgoing Calls are always made from a Server based Landline Number. If you are also making Outbound calls, you might want to consider how this number looks when people will be receiving your calls.

Nature -> Landline Numbers/Mobile Numbers/Toll Free Numbers. Typically, all Landline numbers are susceptible to downtime(due to physical outages like road digging etc.). If you’re heavy on Incoming Calls(e.g Restaurants) and cannot afford downtimes, you should probably look at numbers that are more reliable(Mobile,Toll Free). This will ensure better up-times.

Fancy Numbers -> Cab companies and the like depend a lot on number retentivity among their users. Fancy numbers such as 44224422 or 33553355 are now almost sold out and are very very difficult to find. You are also going to end up paying a fortune for such numbers.

Why do businesses buy Special Numbers?

Ownership -> The numbers are managed by your cloud telephony provider so the ownership of the nature(atleast to start with) is always with them. Landline Numbers cannot be transferred as they are parts of PRI lines(which are physical stacks of numbers) and they also belong to the infrastructure of the service provider. Transfer of Ownership process is very vaguely defined by most telephone operators and it’s not a good idea to rely on this process to keep your beloved numbers close to you. What I’d suggest is, buy a number of your own and use that as a parent Virtual number over cloud telephony. That way the number is always with you and on your name.

Guide to Mobile Number Portability and Ownership Transfer

How to use your existing phone number with cloud telephony.

3) Support

What kind of support engagement are you looking at? Are you more of a Do-It-For-Me(DIM) or Do-It-Yourself(DIY) type of guy? The more control you have on the system, the easier it will be for you to make changes. The more comfortable you are with the product, the lesser you rely on support for anything. It’s always a good idea to quickly watch a few videos and get yourself up to speed with how softwares work to understand what all the products are capable of. Depending on how flexible the system is, you might or might not have to rely on support for most of the things.

This is an almost dominant SaaS market so do not expect Services kind of support in terms of Feature requests, bug fixes, customizations etc. If you’re heavily dependent on APIs, you will need a tech team to help you seamlessly integrate with APIs.

4) SLAs

In terms of pure response times, cloud telephony is much much better than dealing with telecom operators directly. If you’ve ever bought a number for your business, you probably know how much of a pain it usually is. All telecom operators in India don’t have any SLAs. All of cloud telephony usually works on existing operators’ networks, So up-times are usually at the operators’ mercy.  Call quality is comparable to normal network phone calls as the mode of transmission is the same. All SLA figures are actually empirical values computed by manually monitoring historic up-times of the previous months. Up-time is never 100%. If you’re looking at uptimes close to 100%, there are a few service providers which have developed solid fail-overs for numbers like Toll Free Numbers and Mobile Numbers. In terms of Support SLAs, it is a direct function of who the tech team comprises of and how well qualified they are.

5) APIs

Depending on how tech-savvy you are, you will take a look at these APIs at some stage in your business for certain. Be it for integration with your CRM, or for pooling common data, APIs are a terrific tool which is actually one of the coolest things about cloud telephony. All Data is now moving towards the cloud, with cloud telephony, data is now transferable, programmable and cross-linkable real time with infinite other cloud systems.

If you’re looking at doing the integration, make sure you have a good tech team.  APIs might be extremely comprehensive depending on the nature of the product. Do take a look at the API documentation to get a hang of what all is possible with the APIs.

To sum it up, there are now numerous different products in the market, each one trying to solve a set of problems. The differences might lie in cost,features,use and feel, APIs but they are all different solutions. Cloud Telephony is a really powerful tool for Marketing,Analytics and Data integration. Figure out what fits your bill and move forward to the way of telephony awesomeness!!

If you’re looking to buy a cloud telephony solution, and have some more concerns, do feel free to drop me a note and I’ll be glad to help.

Quick reads :-

New TRAI guidelines

Top 10 ways to use Exotel APIs

Analysis on DND customers in Metros

SMS Guide in India

What is Cloud Telephony and who is it useful for?

We wanted to help business owners, entrepreneurs, and SME’s in India understand who is cloud telephony important for and what is it more importantly and when Shivku recently presented at the Google Business Group meetup of Coimbatore he shared this presentation.

Some of the myths around cloud telephony should be solved for your understanding, and if still not, do ping us.

At AyAuto, what drove us was simple; give customers honest auto rickshaws at their doorstep and give drivers more customers.

Customers didn’t need convincing, and came on board immediately. Drivers on the other hand needed more than a little prodding, and a lot of oprant conditioning. As a startup with limited resources, and a model that was infinitely scalable – with some very serious constraints in terms of our bargaining prowess with our supply forces – we had to automate as many processes as we could, spend as little money as we could while focussing on running a startup with an untested model in a completely new market.

Now this was a mammoth task; a Dial-a-Rickshaw service meant we had to have a contact center, at least in principle. We started out with 1 SIM card and 2 call diverts. A day after we launched, we quickly realised this just wouldn’t do; we missed calls left right and centre, had no way to understand which calls were returned and which weren’t and our agents spent too much time entering a customer’s number into the screen.

When we asked around for numbers that could make and receive multiple calls simultaneously, we were introduced to the uber complex and expensive world of PRIs, EPABXs. They cost more than our first quarter’s budget to setup  - the big ugly machine,  an expensive telephone line from an operator, and the telephones for each agent – and much more to maintain – electricity, staff and space. Not only that, we are also warned, and omniously, that a fibre cut when a road’s dug up by the local corporation will ensue in a downtime of at least 4 hours. And from what we noticed every day, as we do in most Indian cities, roads were dug up everyday. The odds weren’t exactly in our favour and we simply couldn’t afford a downtime of 4 hours; that would be social suicide. Even if we were okay with all of these limitations, the process would take a month, and if our location was feasible enough! I couldn’t tell my customers that now, could I?

Enter Cloud Telephony. I still remember the day my co-founder and I came across Exotel’s homepage, in late 2011. We were thrilled. We called even though it was 10pm (they answered!), and they clarified the million questions I had about this. We moved our number to Exotel the very next day. This solved our problem of making and receiving calls from one number, having all that data integrate with our CRM and be down-right inexpensive to setup. And wow, my agents could answer calls from their cell phones itself!

Exactly 3 months into our AyAuto journey, we began scaling. And fast.  So fast that we were burning money almost linearly. A look at our costs showed us that we spent too much time and money just tying up customers with drivers; so much that it was 90% of  our revenue per booking. Let me illustrate.

The old process: A customer calls us for a pickup; we search our CRM for a driver within 5 KM (our autos were tracked with Mobile Triangulation and GPS); we call each of them up (50p per driver) and ask them if they can take the ride; we then call the customer up to confirm/apologise for the ride. Our call costs and the agents that were blocked because of this process added up. It simply wasn’t scalable.

After some brainstorming with Exotel’s CEO, Shivku, we implemented what I still consider a suave mix of Cloud Telephony and…old telephony. We decided to capitalise on Exotel’s new “Missed call” offering. We bought a few numbers, set each number to mean a different thing (this’ll be clear in a minute), and gave each driver an ID card that had these numbers in the back. All these numbers were programmed as speedials in the drivers phone as well. Like thus:

 AyAuto’s Driver ID Card (Front/Back)

Here, the driver would press speedial ’3′ on his phone if he wants to go off for the day, and not receive any more calls. He would press ’4′ if he wanted calls just now. And so on. Each call would hit Exotel’s server, and be automatically cut; so the driver isn’t charged anything and they loved this part! Exotel would then notify our server through their APIs about this driver’s status and AyAuto’s algorithms would take it from there.

The new process was was simple but very effective. When a customer called, our system would automatically lookup drivers in a 5KM radius, understand whether they were busy or free, and automatically send SMSes to them. An SMS looked like this:

We went a step further and automated a few more touchpoints – as you can see in the ID card above, there are a few speed dials for “Picked up” and “Dropped” as well. The driver would use these when he picks up or drops off our customer, respectively.

We learnt this during our times at AyAuto and are sharing openly now, so that you can maybe implement some of this in your travel, taxi, auto, cab, logistics businesses to automate processes especially in implementing technology with drivers, autowallahs and logistics folks in India.

Hope this helps!

Also read up on some other case studies in the travel & transport space by Exotel.