Automated calling for alerts, reminders & updates

Caller ID

The Caller Identification (Caller ID) is required for every phone call of your call broadcast. In order to stay compliant, the Caller ID must be a valid and working 10 digit phone number. It can be a landline phone number, mobile phone number or even a virtual phone number.

The Caller ID is important because it shows your contacts who is calling. Your contacts will appreciate this.

In your account, you can add more than 1 Caller ID if needed. This is especially useful for organizations with multiple locations. A few examples are a religious institution, medical office or retail stores with more than 1 location.

One additional point to remember is that some percentage of your contacts will call the Caller ID phone number back after getting the initial phone call. It's important for your team to be aware of that so they are prepared to receive answer any questions or provide any additional information as needed.

If the call broadcast message was about booking an appointment, the inbound team should be prepared to book an appointment for the customer.

Recordings

There are 2 options with your recordings, a human voice text and a text to speech voice. Depending on the goals of your campaign, one may be a better option than the other.

If you choose the human voice option, you can upload a file from your device into your account. Most popular file types are accepted like MP3 and WAV.

Another option is to call a dedicated phone number and enter a secure PIN to record your message over the phone. The IVR system will prompt you step by step on creating and saving your recording.

It's very important to be in a quiet environment when making recordings for the best clarity possible during the call broadcast to your contacts.

Your recording can be as long as you like. It can be 1 minute, 5 minutes or even longer.

In most situations, recordings are usually less than 30 seconds and that seems to work the best.

For a Notify call broadcast, only 1 recording is required. The same recording can be used for humans and machines.

For an Offer or Remind call broadcast, 2 recordings are required. The recording for humans should contain language like "Press 0 to be transferred to our office". The recording for machines would be different and contain language like "Please call us back at 800...".

For a Poll call broadcast, several recordings are required. For humans, there must be a greeting recording, a recording for each question with answer choices and a closing thank you type recording. The recording for machines should explain why you're calling. Unfortunately, calls answered by machines can not participate in the survey for obvious reasons.

Groups

There are 2 ways to add your phone list into the Sigma Voice automated calling system.

If you have a small phone list or want to create a testing phone list, you can enter the phone number of each contact manually.

For larger phone lists, there is an upload option. All the popular file formats can be used like Excel or even Notepad.

In addition to the phone number, you can add the contact's first name and/or last name as well.

After the group is created, it's easy to add new contacts, edit existing contacts or even delete existing contacts. In the event you want to delete a contact, we recommend adding the contact's phone number to the Call Block List in order to prevent this phone number from being called again.

In your account, you can upload many phone lists. This makes it easy to call a segmented phone list as needed. For example, a home services company may want to do a mass calling campaign to 10,000 customers over the course of 10 days. So the 10,000 contacts can be split into 10 groups of 1,000 phone numbers each.

Of course, you'll be able to call all 10,000 contacts in a few hours with Sigma Voice if you want as well.

Call Block List

In order to stay compliant with the applicable laws and honor your contact's preferences, our automated calling software offers a master do no call list for your convenience.

Any phone number added to your call block list will be automatically "scrubbed" from your phone lists prior to sending the call broadcast.

This is considered a best practice in the bulk messaging industry.

Note: It's not enough to simply remove a phone number from your contact list. Invariably, a new contact phone list will be uploaded with one or more phone numbers that were previously removed. As a result, those phone numbers will be called again unless those phone numbers are also in your call block list.

We also suggest downloading your call block list from time to time for backup purposes.

Call Broadcast

There are a few important settings to consider when setting up the call broadcast.

The first is the date and time. By default, our automated calling service will be send your call broadcast immediately during the window between 9am and 9pm. Alternatively, your call broadcast can be scheduled at a later date or time. It's up to you. For example, tomorrow from 1pm to 4pm.

Next, you'll select the Caller ID and recordings you want to use along with the number of phone lines. The number of phone lines determines how fast your calls will be dialed. For example, if you select 10 phone lines, the system will dial about 600 phone numbers per hour. There is access to up to 100 phone lines by default which calls about 6,000 phone numbers per hour. Additional phone lines are available upon request.

Next, you'll select 1 or more groups you want to call. Our system automatically checks for and removes any duplicate phone numbers across your groups. Also, your groups are scrubbed again your call block list everytime as well.

Lastly, you can choose to retry busy phone numbers from 1 to 5 times. In most cases, if the first attempt is a busy signal the additional attempts will be busy as well. For organizations that are sending critical messages for inclement weather or other emergencies, we suggest using up to all 5 retries.

It's important to remember that most if not all of your customers will listen to your recording (whether answered live or later from their machine). The connect rate is much higher than nonprofit email open rates.

Call Reports

The Call Reports show a summary of how many contacts were called as well as the number of contacts who answered the call, the number of calls that went to voicemail and the number of busy phone numbers.

Answering machine detection is the name of the technology that allows outbound dialers to automatically detect a human answering live versus an answering machine or voicemial.

At any time during the call broadcast, it can be stopped and restarted.

Lastly, there is a CSV and PDF detailed call report that shows the result of each call to your contacts.

The call report is automatically emailed to the admin contacts of your Sigma Voice account at the completion of the voice broadcast.