Answering machines and mass communication services

For the last 15 years, we’ve specialised in providing our customers with resilient, UK based mass communication services. One of the questions we’re often asked is …

How do you handle answering machines?

If you speak to any mass communications software vendor, particularly in the business continuity sector, you will know that answering machines can be tricky. As a customer, you want to reach your people as quickly as possible, by any means necessary – that might mean you capture multiple phone numbers per contact, including personal mobiles or home contact numbers. Realistically though, your contacts can only answer one phone call at a time (and in some cases they can’t answer any). So what should happen to the calls that go through to an answering machine?

Straightforward, secure and reliable

Our latest release of alert cascade gives you the ability to play different messages, depending on whether you’ve connected to a live person or not. So, if your message is for information only and doesn’t include sensitive details or require a response from your contact, you can choose to use the same message for answering machines as you do for live answers.

If you need your contact to give you a reply or your message is commercially sensitive, you can opt to play your full message only when a live(ish!) Person answers the phone. You can even choose to leave a “sanitised” message when you reach answering machines.

Customer feedback shows us that not leaving a message at all is frustrating for your contacts and causes confusion, so we’ve made it as simple as possible for you to bespoke your message configuration to meet your exact needs – simply toggle our answer machine detection on and off to tell us what you need us to do with your calls.

As usual, we guarantee that our calls will be placed showing the dedicated phone number of your choice; your contacts are more likely to answer the call if it is coming from a local phone number or a number they recognise as the company alert system.

Plus, we can help you to route that phone number to your help desk, to a recording of your latest sent message or to your business continuity team. So if one of your contacts dials your dedicated number back instead of listening to their voicemail, checking their sms or replying to their emails (and there’s always on …) you’re in charge of what they hear and who they talk to, helping keep confusion and chinese whispers under control.

Of course, none of this is possible if we can’t tell the difference between a live person and a voicemail … which is why we’re so proud of our answering machine detection, which boasts success rates of over 95%, regardless of whether we’re calling a soft phone, copper landline, voip handset or mobile phone.

Talk to us about how our answer machine detection can improve your mass communications.

For more information about Alert Cascade’s products and solutions, please contact the sales department:

Call: +44 (0) 1733 785999
Email: sales@alertcascade.co.uk

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October 28, 2016

Written by

Marketing Team

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