WRITING
Accepted is not delivered: the day 337 messages reached nobody
For one whole day our software reported success on every send while not one message arrived. Here is what we got wrong and what we changed.
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WRITING
Why nobody can actually give you a phone number in three minutes
Every vendor in this market says minutes. Here is what really has to happen, and why we stopped saying it.
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WRITING
A call centre beside your CRM is two systems and one lost customer
The argument for putting the switchboard inside the CRM rather than next to it, made with the thing that goes wrong.
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WRITING
The follow-up date is the whole product
Recording, transcription and summaries are means. The dated next action is the end, and most products stop one step short of it.
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WRITING
Your number is being marked as spam and your answer rate is the proof
What actually causes a caller ID to get flagged, and the four settings that stop it.
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WRITING
What we have not got: SOC 2, ISO 27001, and a wall of logos
A list of the things a buyer usually checks for that we cannot show, and what we offer instead.
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OPINION
Call volume was never a productivity metric
Two hundred dials a day tells you somebody pressed a button two hundred times. It does not tell you whether the business is any closer to being paid.
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OPINION
Your reps are hitting their call targets and the pipeline is still empty
When activity is green and revenue is red, the activity target is usually measuring the wrong half of the job.
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OPINION
“Call back later” is not a follow-up
It is the most common disposition on most desks, and it is the one that quietly loses the most money, because it contains no date.
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OPINION
A call that is not on the customer's record did not happen
Every calling product records. Very few file. The difference is what the next person to ring that customer can see.
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OPINION
Compliance is losing you more deals than your dialler is
Teams shop for connect rates and dialling speed. What actually stops a campaign is a rule nobody read until the notice arrived.
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OPINION
Why your outbound number gets flagged, and what it costs you
One number, a thousand calls a day, most of them unanswered. Every carrier on the route learns the same thing about you.
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OPINION
Reliability beats features, because a call that does not connect has no features
Every calling product demos well. The difference shows up on a Tuesday afternoon in the third week.
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OPINION
Getting an international number takes longer than vendors admit
Three minutes is the headline on most pricing pages. It is true for a handful of countries and a fiction almost everywhere else.
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EXPLAINER
What an IVR is, and when you actually need one
The press-1-for-sales menu. Useful when there are genuinely several places a call could go, and a tax on everybody when there are not.
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EXPLAINER
Call routing, in plain words
Deciding which phone rings. Everything else — queues, skills, overflow — is a variation on that one sentence.
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EXPLAINER
Whisper, barge and monitor — the three ways to sit in on a call
Same feature family, three quite different levels of interference, and one of them has consent implications.
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EXPLAINER
The call disposition matters more than the recording
One click at the end of a call, and it decides whether anything happens next. Most desks design the list carelessly and pay for it for years.
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EXPLAINER
Answering machine detection, and why it is never perfect
Software guessing whether a human or a voicemail picked up. Useful, genuinely imperfect, and worth understanding before you rely on it.
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EXPLAINER
Softphones, and why we did not build one
A phone that is software instead of hardware. Ours is the browser, which is a deliberate choice and not everyone's preference.
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EXPLAINER
Direct inward dialling (DID), explained without the acronyms
Giving a person their own outside number without buying them their own phone line. It is older than VoIP and it is why extensions work.
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EXPLAINER
Queue callbacks: letting people hang up without losing their place
The caller keeps their position in the queue and gets rung back. Cheap to switch on, and it changes the shape of a bad morning.
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NUMBERS
Indian phone numbers, formatted properly
+91, ten digits, first digit 6 to 9. Most of the mess in a CRM comes from the same four mistakes.
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NUMBERS
TRAI rules for business calling, in plain English
India regulates commercial calls tightly, the rules are published, and “we did not know” has never been a defence.
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NUMBERS
Calling India from the UK, the US or the Gulf
The dialling itself is trivial. What people get wrong is the hours, the number they call from, and the rules at the far end.
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NUMBERS
UAE phone numbers, and what a business can and cannot do there
+971, drop the leading zero, and check what the TDRA says before you plan an outbound campaign.
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NUMBERS
UK phone numbers for business, without the guesswork
+44, drop the leading zero, and know the difference between 01, 02, 03, 07 and 08 before you pick one.
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Calling