What can a business do with a missed call?

BANGALORE, INDIA: When smartphone penetration is yet to reach out to all the citizens, missed call service can be the way out. Ozonetel is a player in this huge market and has broken the world record of crossing over 700 million missed calls in the last nine months and is looking to crossing 1 billion missed calls by April 2015.

CSN Murthy, founder and CEO, Ozonetel, helps understand the prospects and growth of this service and how it helps in engaging customers and grow business.

Ozonetel has an impressive list of clients including Redbus.in, online portal to book inter –state bus tickets, Easypolicy.com, an insurance comparison website, Cold Laser centre, specialized in pain healing through Cold Laser Technology.

CIOL: What can a business do with a missed call?

CM: 1. Lead Capture –Marketers who advertise across mediums still find a challenge to judge ROI’s. Missed calls help to capture 100% of the leads coming from across different mediums which allow businesses to make strategic and cost effective decisions.

2. Survey/Feedbacks – Businesses can get real time feedback on customer experience on service/product and if required alerts can be built on SLA’s and action can be taken. The surveys/ feedback can be in the language of choice by brands .

3. New user activations – Generate interest and get new users engaged with the brands via different kinds of campaigns

4. Run Contests – Incentivize users / target audience to engage with the brand

5. Content on Demand – Bring content on demand to users on information like help material, new offers, new products etc.

CIOL: Missed call service is still catching up. What are its prospects in India?

In a country like India where the mobile phone penetration has reached over 900 million and yet the rich and poor divide is huge and so is the ratio of smart phones v/s feature phonesthere are users who do not want to pay for making a call. The Zipdial acquisition by Twitter is a statement of confirmation on the success of ‘missed call’ service.

We are seeing a number of innovative ideas emerging from this service. Ozonetel has been at the forefront of providing Missed Call Service to a Fortune 500 FMCG company in India and helped them reach over 30million users in less than a year. The campaign is supported by extensive back-end analytics which helps the customer measure the ROI on almost real-time basis. There are clients across e-commerce and retail verticals using the missed call service to promote and measure their “app install” on Smart phones.

In January 2013, analysts put the missed call market size at Rs. 500 crore but with this service getting popular, the Missed Call service in India has seen exponential growth and continues to grow far more rapidly than in any other country.

CIOL: How is this trend evolving globally? Also could you share some insights and give comparative data?

CM: In matured markets like Europe and North America and some countries in Asia where penetration of smart phones is high this service is used to connect directly with the customer to carry out surveys or for getting feedback to understand the customer better. The surveys and the feedback collection is all voice driven. In a country like Singapore where several languages are spoken (Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, Tamil, English and more) marketers can tailor make their campaigns and reach all.

Missed Call Service in emerging markets where the feature phones are more in use and the Internet penetration is lower, the service is used to create healthcare, education awareness besides marketers reaching out.  Markets like South America, Africa is seeing adoption of this service for educating women.

CIOL: Even if it is helping in engaging customers, is this process cost effective?

CM: Missed Call Service has become an effective way to engage and involve customers by any brand/business.  The missed call service is targeted and a cost effective means for businesses to reach out to their target audience. The target audience could be in regions where internet penetration is low or when you want to give a call to action to an online customer who needs to engage with you offline.

Missed Call service on Ozonetel helps the marketer measure the ROI on any campaign.. This is because of excellent real time analytics tools available on the platform.

CIOL: How has this trend evolved over the recent years?

CM: In April 2011, Anna Hazare started the Missed Call campaign to garner support from the masses on ‘fight against corruption’. Anyone could give a missed call to the number given get registered supporting’ fight against corruption.

The IVR based Missed Call has exponentially grown in last few years and it has found many diverse applications in India. The service is being used for providing voice content on phone, collecting customer feedback, to measure marketing and branding campaigns, as mobile number verification service, as mobile radio, for sales enquiries, and much more Missed call also grew because of the fast growth of mobile phones. Incidentally, only mobile phones provide accurate option to give missed call with more mobile phone penetration, we can hope for more missed call based application.

CIOL: What enhancements do you think can be added to this service for more engagement of the customers as well as for the companies?

CM: The applications and enhancements can only be limited by one’s imagination. The engagement can be created by making Missed Call service more interesting by gamifying the experience.

Companies will have to run interesting contests on a regular basis which catches the imagination of the customers and have them hooked on. These will have to be supported by a robust back-end platform and analytics which will make the investment meaningful for the companies who use Missed Call Services.

Ozonetel provides a robust 99.999 percent uptime platform allowing the businesses to use missed calls for their sales, marketing, support and customer retention programs.