Missed call service has become an effective way to engage and involve customers by any brands and enterprises. CSN Murthy, Founder and CEO, Ozonetel explains the viability and feasibility of this customer communication model.
How does ‘missed call’ service help marketers and brands?
The missed call service is a cost-effective means for businesses to reach out to their target audience. The target audience could be based in regions with little or no internet penetration or when you want to give a call of action to an online customer who needs to engage with you.
Lead capture: Marketers who advertise across mediums still find it challenging to judge ROIs. Missed calls help to capture 100 per cent of the leads coming from across different mediums, which allow businesses to make strategic and cost-effective decisions.
Surveys and feedbacks: Businesses can get real-time feedback from customers related to their experience on services and products; if required, alerts can be built on SLAs and action can be taken.
New user activations: One can generate interest and get new users engaged with the brands via different kinds of campaigns.
Run contests: Users and target audience can be offered incentives to engage with the brand.
Content on demand: Businesses can bring content on demand to users on information like help material, new offers, new products, etc.
Ozonetel has been supporting missed calls on its platform for the past four years across 20 verticals. Some of the key retail and FMCG clients that are using missed call service are Hindustan Lever, BigBasket, Zovi, Mahalakshmi Grains, TastyKhana.in, Foodpanda.com, Shaadi.com, Printo, and VLCC.
How can retailers from the fashion and food segments use missed call service?
Missed call service allows the retail brand to engage directly with the customer on their mobile phone. The engagement can happen on an entry level at Rs. 900 to a high-end one. The interesting part is that the engagement can be specific to a campaign or it could be a survey or collecting feedback; this communication can be carried out in any language. For instance, in Trivandrum the language of choice will be Malayalam; in Shillong it will be Khasi; in Hubli it will be Kannada; in Vizag the language will be Telugu; and in Gurdaspur the language used will be Punjabi and so on.
The brands are looking to collect data to understand customer behaviour, trends, and challenges faced. Based on these assessments, data campaigns can be built avoiding spams and losing out on productivity, and thus engaging with customers effectively.
A client used the service to understand the maximum ROI they get from running an advertisement or announcement across media – print (English, Vernacular), online; Google adverts, and television. Traditionally, the brand was investing across mediums, but once on Ozonetel, the brand could identify the medium that yielded maximum response. Hence, for all their future campaigns they made a budget accordingly.
A fashion retail client can use the platform to understand the customer feedback while at the store the data collected can support in building brand loyalty. At the cash register, the customer can be asked to take a quick short survey where a missed call is given and the platform calls back with a set of questions related to understanding the shopping pattern, age group and other information the brand may like. At the end of the survey, the brand may choose to offer a discount coupon or a token for the customer’s valuable feedback.
Food brands can run similar surveys on their brands across grocery stores in the country – this can help them manage their inventory better or down-scale or up-scale a product.
There can be umpteen numbers of ideas where missed call can be used in creative ways.
As retailers the investment goes in understanding the customer and on increasing and training the sales force. Technology plays a crucial role here. What would it mean for a business to invest in such a service?
A missed call campaign on Ozonetel requires minimum or no investment in any hardware or software, since the platform is cloud based. Also, there is no requirement for additional human resources as the whole solution is Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) driven. The platform assures a 99.9 per cent uptime.
Here is it how it works: The missed call number given to the target audience for a campaign will be provided by Ozonetel. The brands need to promote the number. The callers give a missed call to this number. The Ozonetel platform records the caller’s number and the IVR calls them back and plays the required content, which could be a promotional message, a contest, product information or any other message.
Ozonetel is looking to cross one billion missed calls by April 2015. Please tell us a bit about the company and how it works.
Ozonetel has cross 700 million missed calls in the last nine months. We have broken the world record in the platform managing such huge numbers of missed calls. Besides having a Point of Presence (POP) in India, Ozonetel is also present in Singapore, UK, and North America. Missed call was specific to India but marketers globally are recognising the value of missed call. Take for example a country like Singapore, where many languages are spoken. The brands can now use the missed call service to collect the data in the language of the customer’s choice. This can be replicated across the world. We do not see a challenge in crossing a billion missed call mark by April 2015.
Ozonetel is a Telco grade cloud communications platform, which enables businesses to carry out sales, marketing, and support activities. Besides running the ‘Missed call campaigns’, the businesses use the platform for PBX on the cloud for a call centre solution on the cloud.
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