A complete guide to voice broadcasting which is a technology that allows organizations to quickly and easily deliver important pre-recorded audio messages to 100's or even 1,000's of phones within minutes.
There are 4 types of voice broadcasting campaigns. They are Notify, Offer, Poll & Remind. When you sign up for a free trial you can do a free voice broadcast with all 4 types of call broadcasts.
Each campaign type includes many premium features for free including Answering Machine Detection (AMD) which is a technology that allows outbound dialers to quickly identify calls answered by answering machines with a very high degree of accuracy. This is important as you may choose to have 2 separate recordings, 1 for human answers and 1 for manchine answers.
Notify plays your recording to humans and machines. One recording can be used for both scenarios or if you create 2 recordings, one recording can be used for human answers and a separate recording can be used for machine answers.
The Notify campaign type is used by Schools & Universities to call administrators, teachers, parents and students about important updates and alerts.
Offer is a voice broadcasting press 1 campaign that plays your recording to humans along with a live transfer option which says 'press 1 to be transferred to our office'. It will play a separate recording to machines that does not say 'press 1 to be transferred'. The answering machine recording should say, 'please call us back at the following phone number ...'
The Offer campaign type helps recruiting & staffing organizations call their candidates to fill open positions efficiently.
Poll plays your recordings to humans asking one or more questions and collects DTMF responses. It will play a separate recording to machines.
The Poll campaign type is used by associations & unions to survey members about important issues.
Remind plays your personalized text to speech phone call recording to humans and machines.
The Remind campaign helps home services companies reduce customer 'no shows' on service appointments.
All these features are included in your account for free.
Your organization's phone number will be displayed to each of your call recipients so they'll immediately recognize who's calling.
Whether you have a temporary cough or you want to use a robotic tone, just type your message and our TTS voice will take card of the rest.
When your contacts has a language preference, you can offer a choice like "Press 1 for English. Press 3 for Spanish."
In order to honor those who do not want to receive phone calls, there's a "Press 9 to be removed from this calling list" option. It's easy and those phone numbers are stored in your account's DNC list.
You can upload just one group or multiple groups within your organization. Then you can call 1 group or several groups with your call broadcast. Additionally, you can add, edit and delete contacts as well.
After your message plays to your call recipients, there a "Press * (star) to repeat this message." option. This is convienant way to help ensure the important information has been received.
When it's really important that every person hears the audio recording, you have the option to retry busy phone numbers from 1 to 5 times. Of course, you can set the retries to zero.
Our AMD technology determines in real time whether the phone call answered by a live person or an answering machine. The helps ensure your complete recording is played in it's entirety for each schenario.
If you'd like to speak with contacts directly after they listened to your message, you can offer a push-to-talk "Press 1 to be transferred to our office" option. Otherwise, they can call back the Caller ID phone number on their phone.
When getting your message heard very quickly is important, you can use up tp 50 Sigma Voice phone lines. This means you can call a phone list of 3,000 phone numbers in about 1 hour.
You have the option to send your calls immediately which is usually between 9am and 9pm. In additonal, you can schedule your calls to start on a future date and time.
Your call report will show 1 of 3 call dispositions for each phone number along with person's name and the date and time. The call dispositions are human answer, machine answer and no answer.
With a basic notification call broadcast, there is no interactivity. Your recording simply plays to your contacts after they say 'Hello' or after the answering machine greeting and 'beep'. Of course, your Caller ID will be displayed on their Caller ID display, so they can call that phone number if they want.
With interactive voice broadcasting, each call recipient that answers their phone hears a prompt to press one or more DTMF keys. It's also referred to as a voice broadcasting press 1 campaign.
Your call recipients can interact with the phone call by pressing buttons on the phone keypad to navigate through a phone menu or be directly transferred in real-time to an agent without having to place a call separately.
The recording for each contact can be personalized using text-to-speech (TTS) technology using the customer provided phone list data.
It works similar to an email campaign or a text campaign and it can boost response rates as well.
There are 2 options with personalization. One option is for the entire message can use the text to speech voice. The other option is to use a human voice for the static parts of the message and use the text to speech voice for the dynamic parts of the message.
Below is an example script that can be used. The words ih bold are using the free text to voice technology.
One of the many benefits of using a hosted #voicebroadcasting service versus an on-premise voice broadcast software is the instant access to a large number of phone lines.
The number of phone lines used determines the speed at which your phone list will be dialed.
Let's use an example phone number list with 1,000 contacts.
In general, when manually calling a phone number, the 3 possible outcomes are human answer, machine answer and no answer.
The same is true with automated voice broadcasting.
Regardless, these outcomes are referred to as call dispositions.
With an up-to-date phone list, the human answer and machine answer should make up the large majority of the call dispositions. The no answers should be quite small. Also, there is no charge for no answers.
Here is a quick example for a phone list of 1,000 contacts.
After the call broadcast is completed, 450 calls were answered by humans, 450 calls were answered by machines and 100 calls were no answers.
Please review the pie chart below.
Even though there is no charge for no answers, it's a good idea to review your phone list data to determine why those phone numbers did not answer.
Some frequently asked questions.
Yes! Sigma Voice offers a free trial of the calling service only. In order to qualify, please register using a company email address like name@organization.com.
You can call 1,000 contacts for about $50 in about 10 minutes. That's about 100 calls per minute! This example is based on a 30-second voice recording, which is an average recording length for an automated phone call. This is based on 10 cents per minute.
Yes. This is especially useful for organizations with multiple locations. Simply add each Caller ID one time then it's available to be used in a call broadcast.
Your recording can be as long as you want. Be sure to record in a quiet room to make sure the recording is as clear as possible.
Sigma Voice accepts many popular formats like Microsoft Excel, CSV and TXT. Each phone number should consist of 10 digits.
Canada and US phones all use one single format: (NXX) NXX-XXXX, where N is 2–9 and X is 0–9.
Parentheses, dashes and periods or ok. Also, duplicate phone numbers will be automatically removed.
Sigma Voice accepts multiple forms of payment exclusively through PayPal.
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A complete guide to voice broadcasting which is a technology that allows organizations to quickly and easily deliver important pre-recorded audio messages to 100's or even 1,000's of phones within minutes.