Star2Billing are proud to release version 1.3 of Newfies-Dialer.

There are a number of enhancements to this latest version of Newfies-Dialer, including scalability, speeding up the import and campaign start process, allowing duplicate contacts on a campaign, adding Chinese and Turkish to the interface, in addition to a round of bug fixes as reported by our community.

The installation scripts have been enhanced, making them more robust, and adding options to install Freeswitch from the yum repository as well as speeding up the installation of Newfies-Dialer.

There was a time when if you wanted to market your product or services to people there was only two options: the phone and the mail service. Now, with the internet, a myriad of different marketing tools are available, from emails and websites, to social media, blogs and even video channels. However, these new marketing tools haven’t made the old methods obsolete; in fact, many of these digital marketing methods have made voice marketing even more effective.

While sending out emails to all your customers and potential clients may seem like an easy way of promoting your business, you can never know exactly how many of these emails have landed in people’s inboxes or are actually sucked up by spam filters. Furthermore, because people receive so many emails throughout the day, very few of them are actually read in their entirety.

Voice Broadcast Marketing

Voice broadcast marketing can yield a far better response rate compared to email or direct mail. Even live telemarketing can’t offer such results as people often hang up on salespeople over the phone before the telemarketer has even had a chance to deliver the message. With a recorded voice broadcast, people are more receptive to hearing the message, as they don’t feel the same pressure to interact. This ensures the voice message is listened to in its entirety. In addition, despite the prevalence of the internet, not everybody is online, but nearly everybody has access to a phone, whether a landline or mobile, which makes voice broadcast marketing able to reach a larger number of people than even email.

For some industries, business is done solely by phone. Think of service industries such as taxi companies. Few taxi companies allow their customers to order a cab by email, so speaking to somebody at a taxi company requires picking up the phone. Of course, taxi companies are very busy, so any salesperson trying to offer a taxi operator cheap taxi insurance or other relevant product, may be seen as a nuisance. However, a short, concise voice message is more likely to be listened to, especially if it is offering a product or service that would interest the taxi company in question.

With voice broadcast messaging, it doesn’t even matter if people aren’t about to answer the phone. Because voice broadcast marketing doesn’t require instant interaction with a salesperson, it is just as effective when messages are left on an answer machine, and people generally listen to the entire message once they check their voice mail service.

Voice Dialers

Telemarketing can be expensive. Having to pay sales staff to call round your target customers can become extremely costly, especially when you consider the poor success rate of telemarketing. However, by using an autodialer, a single message can be sent to hundreds, thousands or even millions of people, all of whom will receive the exact same message, without any deviation.

Voice dialers have a wide range of marketing applications, including:

• Sales – selling up-selling and cross-selling products and services.
• Building customer loyalty – keep existing customers up to date with the latest offers, products and services
• Fund-raising – for charities and political campaigns, an autodialer provides a simple and inexpensive solution for reaching large numbers of people
• Information delivery – for emergency broadcasts, or the latest news from the financial markets
• Appointments – confirming and arranging meetings, appointments and conference attendance
• Brand building – increasing brand awareness and enhancing a company’s image.

Newfies-Dialer

Originally designed for a charity in Zimbabwe, where internet was limited but there was a comprehensive mobile phone coverage, Newfies-Dialer was used to provide people with health information. However, because Newfies-Dialer can reach hundreds, thousands and even millions of people each day, it is the perfect solution for effective and inexpensive voice broadcast marketing.

Newfies-Dialer can support distributed processing on cloud servers or be installed on a standalone server, and it is simple and easy to use. Contacts, phonebooks and campaigns are selected by the user, who then chooses a voice application. Newfies-Dialer then spools the outbound calls using the Freeswitch Telephony engine, which dials the contact, and once the call is answered, either by a person or an answering machine, Newfies-Dialer is notified and the relevant message is relayed via Freeswitch.

Regardless of the marketing application, Newfies-Dialer provides a simple and effective way for reaching huge numbers of contacts and delivering messages that actually get heard, which makes it one of the most effective auto dialer systems around for delivering voice broadcast marketing.

Written by our Guest Blogger, Imogen Reed

Star2Billing are pleased to announce the availability of an SMS module for Newfies-Dialer which gives Newfies-Dialer the capability to send text messages to cell phones for the purposes of marketing, mass emergency broadcasting, and dissemination of information.

SMS Dashboard

Sending SMS messages to many thousands of contacts builds on the capabilities of Newfies-Dialer to provide voice broadcasting and automatic surveying.

Newfies-Dialer is designed for telecoms companies that wish to provide auto-dialling and SMS broadcasting facilities to their customers, as well as organisations and businesses that wish to disseminate information to their contacts, for marketing, informational messages and emergency broadcasts.

For more information about the Newfies-Dialer SMS module, please see http://www.newfies-dialer.org/add-ons/sms-module/ or contact us.

This latest release of Newfies-Dialer adds some of the the following enhancements, from improvements to the survey functionality through to brand new features such as Answering Machine Detection.

Phone Blasting and Autodialer software

Survey Templates

The survey has been enhanced to easily allow repetitive surveys and maintain consistent reporting. A survey template is created, and when it is attached to a campaign, a copy is made of the survey, and all reports pertaining to that campaign are correctly linked.

Enhancements to the survey branching, logic and capabilities :

• Retry logic to keep calling a contact until the survey is completed.
• Completion status to denote a survey has been fully completed.
• Branching supports invalid input.Support branching on timeout on a per node basis.
• Capture entries with X digits (i.e. capture phone-number).
• Display calls completed in reporting modules and dashboard.Include variables in Text to Speech.

Answering Machine Detection

The commercial AMD module allows Newfies-Dialer to detect whether the contact answering the phone is a real person answering the call or whether it is a voicemail message.

If the AMD module detects voicemail, then it will listen for the “record-your-message-now” beep and play the message to be left on the contact’s voicemail when recording starts.

Further information about this module can be found at http://www.newfies-dialer.org/add-ons/voicemail-detection/

Other Enhancements

• Continuous Integration – Applying continuous quality control in order to increase the quality of the software.
• Deployment – Newfies-Dialer platform deployed with Nginx, Gunicorn, Supervisord and Postgresql for the best possible performance.
• Better DBMS – We now only support Postgresql so we can concentrate on optimising the database for the best possible performance.
• Comprehensive API – Straightforward integration with third party applications using API’s that correspond to each function available via the web interface.
• Real-time reporting – Overview and detailed reporting of surveys and calls.
• Extension Dialing – Dial the PSTN number, and then on answer send the DTMF for the extension.
• Direct Freeswitch Integration – IVR logic coded in Lua for direct integration to Freeswitch for better performance and  flexibility when adding new features.
• TTS Preview – Preview how the TTS sounds in the browser.
• SMS Support – Commercial module supporting mass SMS broadcasting from Newfies-Dialer. Read More.

A full list of the changes to Newfies-Dialer can be found at https://github.com/Star2Billing/newfies-dialer/commits/master

Any telecoms company wanting to provide multi-tenant voice and SMS broadcast facilities to their customers, or any business that needs to broadcast marketing, emergency and informational messages to their contacts may wish to consider Newfies-Dialer. Please contact us for more details.

The question most often asked of us is “How many concurrent calls can Newfies-Dialer do”, so for this release, we have spent some time doing some testing and benchmarking, investing in a 4 core Intel Xeon server with 32Gb of RAM and a 120Gb SSD drive to see what results we could achieve on relatively modest server hardware.

We set up a test environment and imported a list of 1 million contacts and set a campaign going to see what would happen, and then tweaked the configuration of the operating system, Freeswitch and database for the best possible performance.

The results were impressive. We were able to make 1 million calls in under 5 hours, running at a constant load of 800 concurrent calls.

The challenge now, for the Newfies-Dialer administrator, is to find a carrier who can handle the capacity of Newfies-Dialer to make calls, and a hosting provider to provide sufficient bandwidth.

Should more capacity be required, Newfies-Dialer can be configured in a distributed architecture using separate servers for dispatching call requests, making the calls and analysing the data from the campaign. Contact us for more details.

Yours

The Newfies-Dialer Team

Hi Everyone,

We will be introducing the new Version of Newfies-Dialer at the weekly FreeSWITCH conference.

Please find the slides to follow the presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/areski/newfies-dialer-autodialer-freeswitch-weekly-conference-13-march2013

Download PDF: Newfies-Dialer – Autodialer : Freeswitch Weekly Conference 13March2013

For instructions to join the conference, please see http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2013_03_13

Auto dialer software is designed to process multiple calls simultaneously to contacts playing recorded or text to speech messages, detect answering machines (AMD), capture responses by means of DTMF touch-tones entered by the customer, record calls, transfer to a live agent as well as support Do Not Call lists.

Newfies-Dialer provides all of these functions, and in addition to which, supports multi-tenancy which lends itself to companies wishing to offer voice broadcasting services to its customers, as well as organisations that wish to broadcast emergency, marketing and informational messages to their customers.

Read more about Newfies-Dialer as autodialer solution : http://www.newfies-dialer.org/auto-dialer-software/

Star2Billing have launched a new product, Emerzia (http://www.emerzia.com), an emergency alert auto-dialer and SMS delivery system for communities, educational establishments and local government that can send millions of emergency alerts in a few hours.

Reverse emergency broadcasting is used in scenarios such as evacuation notices, missing person alerts, crime prevention, community alerts and weather alerts.

The Emerzia Emergency Alert System is offered in three variants to meet the needs of a small community or school, right up to a large university or metropolitan area.

• Emerzia Metropolitan: High capacity multi-server emergency alert system for large university campuses and metropolitan areas.
• Emerzia Standard: Single server system emergency alert system for towns, rural counties, large colleges and schools.
• Emerzia Lite: Competitively priced single server entry level alert system designed for communities, church groups and schools.

Emerzia Standard Edition includes:

• Flexible IVR to create a range of interactive voice broadcasts.
• Reporting Interfaces giving a range of statistics and downloadable reports.
• Sign-up page to allow contacts to register for emergency alert messages.
• Answering machine detection to deliver a different message if the call is answered by voicemail.
• SMS capability to send text messages to cell-phones.
• Full training for staff on the Emerzia system.
• Unlimited support included.

View our website at www.emerzia.com and contact our sales team by email to hello@emerzia.com or phone on +1-202-464-8397 to discuss your requirements.

The Newfies-Dialer development team have been working hard on developing and including new graphs for Newfies-Dialer using DS.J3 (NVD3), which will arrive in the next release of Newfies-Dialer.

The graph shows two axis to show calls and duration on the same graph.

Above is the Admin dashboard graph, giving at-a-glance statistics on key indicators.
For developers reading this and who may want to incorporate it into their own projects, The aim of the Django-NVD3 project is to build re-usable charts and chart components for d3.js without taking away the power that d3.js gives you. See https://github.com/areski/django-nvd3 for the source code and instructions.

We look forward to the next release of Newfies-Dialer  with beautiful new graphs very soon.

Yours

The Newfies-Dialer Team

We have released the latest version of Newfies-Dialer with a range of features and optimisations for even better performance alongside an overhaul of our Newfies-Dialer website.

We redesigned the Newfies-Dialer website to reflect our growing commercial client-base to make it easier to find our various products and services. We’d like to hear what you think of the changes.

We’ve also reduced the prices of our installation services and hosting. (http://www.newfies-dialer.org/pricing/)

In respect of Newfies-Dialer, the main changes are:

• Installation script adapted to work with Debian Wheezy.
• PostgreSQL upgraded to 9.3.
• Code optimisation.
• Template refactoring using Crispy Forms.
• Bugs Fixed.

Since the last version of Newfies-Dialer, SMS broadcasting is included as standard as is our latest new feature, appointment reminders.

Please contact us for more information.

The post Call Center Dialer with Newfies-Dialer appeared first on Newfies-Dialer.

When considering auto-dialing software, there are three names that always come to the top of the search engine listings, Vicidial, Goautodial, and of course, our own Newfies-Dialer.

Vicidial

Vicidial [http://www.vicidial.com] has been around for well over a decade and is an open source auto-dialer system developed and maintained mostly by volunteers. It’s based on Asterisk as the telephony engine and uses PHP and MySQL.

Vicidial is a free-of-charge and open source product requiring a certain degree of experience and expertise in order to deploy and maintain it, ensuring that patches are applied, especially those concerning security, and that best practices when deploying telephony systems are employed. This can be quite daunting for some people, especially if IT and telecoms are not their primary business, although support can be purchased through their website.

GoAutodial

From Vicidial grew GoAutodial [https://goautodial.com/]. The underlying telephony system has the same roots, but GoAutoDial is a paid-for commercial product and adds extra reports and friendlier admin screens backed up by support. Support credits can be purchased via their website.

Newfies-Dialer

Newfies-Dialer is a commercial product using Freeswitch [https://freeswitch.com] as its underlying telephony engine, renowned for being able to handle high call volumes. It’s built using a modern Python framework optimised for high performance.

As a commercial product, Newfies-Dialer is backed up with unlimited support, at no extra charge, and all updates, security and patching is handled by us so you can concentrate on your core business, rather than getting tied up in the technology.

We deploy Newfies-Dialer in the cloud, so getting you up and running is quick and easy, and like Vicidial and Goautodial, you use your own VoIP telecoms carriers.

Where Newfies-Dialer does excel is that it is multi-tenant, it can be branded, so it lends itself to telecoms companies and SAAS companies wanting to offer auto-dialer services. Newfies-Dialer even includes a billing module so you can bill customers for their calls.

Which option you choose depends on what skills you have in-house, the time you have available and money to spend, but if you want to know more about Newfies-Dialer, contact us for a chat and a live demo so you can make a few test calls.

The post Vicidial vs Goautodial vs Newfies appeared first on Newfies-Dialer.

Recently, the Newfies-Dialer team  assisted in providing some consultancy to another telecoms company, and changed the way they did business dramatically by providing a debt management and collections system.

The telecoms company was providing telephone services to its 15,000 mainly residential customers billing relatively small amounts of money per customer, but amounting to many thousands overall.

Customers could opt to pay via direct debit or would pay on receipt of invoice, either by credit card over the phone or direct bank transfer.

Direct debits were taken automatically, and mostly without problem, but customers who were paying on receipt of invoice often forgot to pay in a timely manner, so two people were employed on debt management and collections to phone up debtors and ask for payment.

We provided an automated dialer system which would ring up thousands of debtors, politely remind them that they needed to pay, and offered an option to “press one” to be put through to the collections department, where they could give their credit card details over the phone and pay the bill.

The results were:

• The customers reacted well to being reminded to pay with a polite message.
• One month’s work of the two debt management staff was completed in two days
• The extra revenue collected paid for our consultancy more than twice over, in the first month.
• Debt was collected in a timely manner so it did not get out of hand.
• The debt management and collections team were able to concentrate on larger historical debt.

Debt is not necessarily related to a customer wanting to avoid payment, more so that failure to pay is an oversight, and if this goes unchecked, then it becomes a problem and more difficult to collect.

Newfies-Dialer can play a major part in debt management and control, particularly in cases where there are large numbers of people each owing relatively small amounts of money. Newfies-Dialer has a number of features that make it good debt collection software, including:

• Easy upload of debtor’s numbers to call.
• Cycle caller ID delivered to contacts
• Tag replacement to customise each message using Text to Speech
• Transfer-to-Agent to discuss the debt, or take payment.
• Auto-Redial contacts who hang up immediately or who don’t answer.
• Answering Machine detection to leave a different message on voicemail
• API for developers to integrate in-house applications.

Using Newfies-Dialer as part of your debt management and collections system can help you interact with your customers, collect payments, chase debt, reduce staff head-count, or help existing staff work more efficiently.

Call or email us to discuss how Newfies-Dialer might benefit your debt management and collections process.

The post Debt Management Collections System appeared first on Newfies-Dialer.

We have just released the latest version 3.8 of Newfies-Dialer.

This latest version brings a raft of improvements to the dashboard and reporting to display realtime and historical statistics on the user interface.

Much of the work for this release was under the hood, building a more robust and expandable call and data recording system which in turn allows us to display key performance metrics on dashboard and campaign screens.

Improvements to Newfies-Dialer include:

• Enhanced Dashboard more detail on campaigns and concurrent calls.
• Dashboard showing more detail on call dispositions.
• B-leg statistics for press one call transfers
• Live display of calls in progress against each campaign as well as campaign progress.
• Simple import to import only a list of numbers.
• Improved CDR and export to include more detailed metrics and call cost

If you need voice broadcasting or press one lead transfer generation, then contact us to discuss your requirements and to allow us to provide you with a live demo to illustrate the extensive capabilities of Newfies-Dialer.

Yours,

The Newfies-Dialer Team

The post Newfies-Dialer 3.8 Released appeared first on Newfies-Dialer.

Back in August 2017, Symantec sold its website security and PKI solutions to DigiCert, who specialise in SSL and PKI technologies.

Google had problems with the way that Symantec handled certificates, and has from mid-April 2018, decided to stop trusting Symantec issued certificates in their chrome browser, even those that are issued by an intermediate organisation which used Symantec as their root of trust, such as Thawte, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL.

This will mean that when using Chrome, websites with Symantec certificates will be listed as untrustworthy. This is a huge issue if you are selling products online on your SSL secured website.

This has given companies who sell SSL certificates to companies around the world a big problem, they need to contact each of their customers who have Symantec issued certificates and issue a new certificate.

The SSL Store, https://www.thesslstore.com/ contacted us and asked if we could help with our voice broadcasting product, Newfies-Dialer. The SSL Store is a premium SSL service provider offering certificates at discounted prices along with support.

We can help

The SSL Store team had no experience in voice broadcasting, so we were able to help them with an introduction to a carrier who had world wide termination. We then assisted with sanitising their telephone data and getting it uploaded to the system and wit some direction from us they had no problems with cleaning their data for upload.

Setting up Newfies-Dialer

Newfies-Dialer was configured with a Press-1 campaign playing a message explaining to the SSL store customer the reason for the call, and what needs to be done.

• If the customer presses 1, then they are diverted through to their customer services team who can issue new certificates and help their customer with getting this resolved.
• If the customer presses 3, then they are added to the DNC list and never called again.
• If voicemail was detected, then a voicemail message is left after the beep suggesting the customer be called back.

Retries

Clearly, it’s really important for The SSL Store to get through to their customers, so not only was Newfies-Dialer configured to call back if their was not answer, if the call was answered, and the customer did not take some sort of action, for instance talking to an agent, (or pressing 3 for DNC) then the customer would be called back a couple more times, hopefully to complete the survey.

Reporting

At the end of each day, they could download the survey reports, the SSL Store were able to compile who had been contacted, and make up new lists for the next day’s calls.

Conclusion

We were pleased to help The SSL Store with contacting everyone so that come the April 17th upgrade of Chrome, sysadmins do not end up with furious emails as to why their site is insecure.

The post Newfies-Dialer Helping to Renew SSL Certificates appeared first on Newfies-Dialer.

Newfies-Dialer is a multi-tenant power dialer and voice broadcasting system with billing capabilities.

Today, we’ve introduced a new easy contact import system which can take any text or CSV file, with any number of fields in it.

We have done a short video at

You import contacts with these simple steps:

1. Select the phonebook to which you want to import,

2. Select the file to import.

In advanced features, you can select the type of delimiter and shuffle the imported file. If there is only one column in your file, or the delimiter is a comma, you don’t need to select the delimiter, just click `next`
Millions of phone numbers can be imported at a time.

3. Review the import preview and select the fields you want to import with the  “Belongs to” select option.

You can import as many fields as you want to a contact, the data can then be used with your phone calls and SMS.

You can select which fields you want to import along with any extra fields you need for tag replacement.

Tag replacement is where you can play custom information to a contact, such as an appointment date and time using text to speech. For instance:

“Hello {full_name}, there is a special offer  at your local store located at {store_address}

The tags {full_name} and {store_address} are replaced with name and local store location data uploaded with the contact.

4. Finally, the import is done, you will get a report of the number of imported contacts.

We believe this will make it a lot easier for people to quickly import contact files, then exploit this data in Newfies-Dialer.

If you want to try a demo of our autodialer platform, please contact us or email newfies-dialer@star2billing.com

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