Automated phone calls to your customers, employees, members or citizens can drastically improve efficiency and effectiveness. Especially when fast feedback is required, a ‘robocall’ beats all other channels, on the condition you have the consent of the people you’re calling.
Whether it’s about notifying people, assembling a crisis team, finding job candidates, confirming/managing appointments, automated phone calls can make a difference.
Proximus’ NextGen voice platform is uniquely positioned in Belgium, supporting local languages, and a competitive pricing towards Belgian phone numbers.
Johan De Belie, product owner Customer Interaction Solutions
Voice APIs versus managed voice services
While many CPaaS platforms offer extensive voice APIs, implementing a state-of-art voice application is a specialty on it’s own. While it’s easy to build a first working version of any application, managing errors and exceptions related to the complexity of international telephony networks is a whole other story…
Non-existing numbers, network errors, voicemail detection, number normalization, call forwards, multilingual contexts, call recording, dmf handling, … each bring their own challenges. On top of that, a voice application needs to manage a lot of real-time events, which keep the call going, while processing data asynchronously…
An average voice call needs between 10 to 100 API-calls
Unless building voice applications is your core business, the better approach is to find a partner that can build a flow for you, taking away the burden of developing and maintaining a your own call code, and offering you ‘simple and functional API-endpoints’. These functional API-endpoints make abstraction of the complex call handling & conversational flow behind, and just let you launch calls and process the end result.
There is no such thing as ‘outbound only’
As people have stopped answering calls from unknown numbers, it’s highly advised to dial out with your company’s numbers, but this also means that people will be calling back.
Even if you don’t want customers to call you back, they will still do so
Solutions like NextGen voice can easily handle these return calls in different ways:
- link return calls to the original outbound call, and pickup the conversation from there
- let callers leave a message and deliver it to your email or applications
- transfer calls to your employees
Looking for a partner to help you automate voice calls? Don’t hesitate to contact us