Voiceshot – Easy Way to Get a Message Out – Automated Message Calling
We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)
So how do they do that? VoiceShot.com is one way. Here’s the situation. One of my vocations is piano lessons and I have around 20 students each week. Our second son was due to be born early in Februray and I was going to cancel a week of lessons after that, but I didn’t want to have to spend a day making calls to do it. Voiceshot offers many services, one of them is outbound. This means, you record a message, upload a list of numbers and it will send the same message to all the numbers on the list. (Cheaply). The cost was around 12 cents per completed call. So, for less than 5 dollars and about 20-30 minutes of setup time I saved what would have been several hours on the phone chatting.
What if we wanted to get fancy? We could have posed a question and prompted to press 1 if Yes, press 2 if no. Voiceshot then records the results. (I WISH this had been around when I had that college phone marketing survey to do….)
Voiceshot offers other services too. Some of their big services are notifications for schools and businesses. If you’re a school administrator and need to let parents know that you’re canceling classes early for instance, you might use a service like voiceshot to get your message out.
That’s not where it stops, there is more… Would you like your own IVR system? You can do it with Voiceshot and have them direct the incoming calls to you. So, you get a toll free number “virtual receptionist” and the incoming calls can then be directed through any number of menu items and directed to the phone numbers and extensions of your choice. Your own virtual PBX anywhere.
This is a company that ought to do well.