It’s now just over a year that we’ve been living through the coronavirus pandemic; the largest health crisis to have affected the world, well, ever. The exponential speed at which this virus continues to grow and affect us in every corner of the world is unprecedented, and now more than ever, there is a need to have quick, efficient, and reliable lines for crisis communication. The speed of this has created a demand for a corona virus hotline in every country and within every organization.

In this article, TeleForwarding highlights the use and importance of a corona virus hotline for testing providers, testing locations, and clinical research, as well as custom corona virus hotline and messaging solutions exclusive to TeleForwarding. Take advantage of our expertise and experience within the clinical research and healthcare sector to help you streamline your crisis communications.

Corona virus hotline for testing providers and locations

Testing providers: We have clients with large influxes of coron avirus related inbound calls who have implemented a 0800 number to scale-up their services nationally. This type of number can be an asset to your company, too. Having a corona virus hotline that is designated for questions and orders for your specialized testing kits and related products and/or services that are in high demand during this crisis, having a specific corona virus hotline allows you to cater to the large influx of calls without disrupting your telephone traffic on a regular business day. Alternatively, with the global scaling of your testing locations, you can set up a unique corona virus hotline for each country where you offer sales, service and support for your products. When it comes to questions, you can save even more time by creating custom voice recorded answers to the most frequently asked questions about pricing and distribution, among other things.

Testing locations: From scheduling and/or changing appointments, to discussing results and next steps, a corona virus hotline is a huge and perhaps necessary asset for your testing location. Having a local virtual number for testing locations in different cities not only emphasises your proximity to clients, but also helps to scale your inbound and outbound coronavirus related calls. Alternatively, you can set up a single coronavirus hotline that gets redirected to the location of your caller’s choice, having one central number that you can advertise in all of your crisis communications, from marketing materials to e-mail signatures. Alternatively, you can set up a corona virus hotline for each independent testing location so as to keep things simple for local callers and call agents responsible for handling call traffic in-house.

Corona virus hotline for clinical research

As it’s important to track participants experiences, potential side effects, needs, and results in wide-scale clinical research of various treatments for acute and ‘long covid’, having a coronavirus hotline is an imperative tool for your research team. You can use a corona virus hotline for various steps and uses in your research: sign up and intake interviews, new/increased/decreased symptom reporting, follow-up appointments and surveys, and the list goes on. Due to the unpredictable nature of clinical research, the implementation of a flexible and reliable corona hotline is no doubt the simplest step to scaling your research across state, province, or country borders.

Custom corona hotline solutions

Are you looking for customised solutions for your corona hotline and crisis communications needs? TeleForwarding understands the need and is experienced with the set-up and maintenance of services for global service-windows enabling your organisation to be available 24/7 to offer your communities, customers, and employees with accurate and easy to access information. We can help you provide telephonic solutions for enquiries about business hours, visiting hours, appointment scheduling, as well as helping you offer them answers to the questions that might be keeping them up all night in relation to the current global health crisis. With the probability of your callers asking the same questions, we can offer custom solutions allowing you to create voice recordings to answer your most frequently asked questions at the press of a button using our voice response platform. Not to mention the fact that we have thorough and broad experience working with our clinical research and healthcare sector clients to create voice response from the callers’ side, giving them the autonomy to leave a message at their leisure rather dealing with long hold times. These are just examples of the types of customisable solutions we have offered clients when it comes to crisis communication, but our sales support team is always happy to think with you to create solutions that fit your specific needs.

Why TeleForwarding?

As you have read in this article, this question has actually already been answered. Specialized knowledge and skills for quick delivery of flexible, reliable, high quality connection to all countries on all continents; these are the core values upon which we pride ourselves at  TeleForwarding, especially in this extended period of the covid-19 pandemic. Our team of specialists with a combined multiple decades years of experience in the field of telecommunications understand the urgency for reliable, low cost solutions. It is our pleasure to contribute our international telecom services and to be a pillar of support for those who are directly involved in the fight against covid-19.

Think about all the time we spend these days sending threads upon threads of emails, taking calls, and attending Zoom-meetings. Days spent working from home tend to seem longer than those you spent in the office, don’t they? It’s become normal to find yourself led astray by the myriad tempting offers we find online while casually browsing and before you know it, you might have made a purchase, yet again, prompted by Facebook or Instagram ads leading you to an online store front. After just a sliver of guilt for a leisure spend during work hours, you feel the excitement of getting your new thing, be it an article of clothing or new set of pens.

No worries, it happens to all of us.

Online retail visits and sales projections

In fact, online sales have been breaking records as the number of online retail consumers, globally, in the first six months of the global COVID-19 pandemic rose from 16.7 billion visits per day to 22 billion visits per day, between January and June 2020, respectively. Additionally, it is estimated that there are over 2 billion online retail customers – that’s a quarter of the world’s estimated population!

The difference between physical goods stores and dropshippers

So it’s been a week since you’ve made your purchase. You’ve already e-mailed the seller asking for a status update and they have kindly instructed you to be patient, we’re working on it. “How long can it possibly take?”, you think, “the address says they’re just down the road”, right?

One of the biggest changes we’re seeing in modern e-commerce is the rise of companies who use dropshipping as opposed to selling their own physical goods. Whereas the latter requires the store owner to buy and hold stock of the products they are selling, the former makes it possible for the store owner to have an e-commerce store front where orders are sent directly to wholesale suppliers who send the goods directly to the customer. This means that stores who use a dropshipping model are able to offer goods at much lower prices than traditional brick-and-mortar-turned-e-commerce stores and more often than you think, your “local deal” actually comes from a few continents away.

Who are these retailers? Well, generally, the wholesale suppliers who actually send the product to the customer are based in China (usually from large scale e-commerce platforms like aliexpress or taobao). But often the face of the companies that consumers think they are buying from seem to be local sellers; leaving consumers stumped as to why their packages take so long (4, 5, even 6 weeks) to arrive.

These seemingly local stores then tend to rely on chatbots to deal with their customer service, but in some countries, such as Germany and The Netherlands, it is required by law to have a phone number connected to your website.

The customer service dilemma

Dropshipping retailers are by definition entrepreneurs, sometimes attracted to the main benefit of not needing a large investment or space to start a dropshipping company. However, what dropshipping companies don’t realise they are missing is the essential contact between the customer and the company, whether that be for sales or support.

In order to help the increase of customer satisfaction and sales, it remains a key factor for dropshipping retailers to maintain a local presence that is accessible via phone. Luckily, a physical phone or landline system doesn’t have to be the solution here.

Business phone numbers for dropshippers

Dropshipping retailers can now choose from a wide range of customer service phone numbers:

1. Uifn numbers which expand a company’s global presence and allows customers to call companies for free from 45 countries
2. Toll free numbers which home in a company’s global presence to a national level and are available to call for free in 100+ countries
3. Virtual phone numbers which hone in a company’s national presence to a local level and allow consumers to call companies with local area codes, at local rates

Modern telcos like TeleForwarding offer VoIP numbers which allow companies to route their business numbers through any destination number – mobile or landline – of their choice. Our additional features offer even more flexibility to give you the best use of your business phone number:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Voice2Mail offers the choice to direct calls directly to voice mail, where the voice file is converted to text and sent to your company email address. This is great for calls that come in after hours so you can get to customers first thing the next business day.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

For dropshippers and e-commerce entrepeneurs, there is much to be gained and we at TeleForwarding would be glad to help you.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

The 5 Best Benefits of Domestic Toll Free Numbers

1. Toll Free numbers increase your customer satisfaction
   With a standard specific setup per city/country, international business phone numbers are easy to remember for your customers. Using local business phone numbers for your international customers is a sure-fire way to attract more business.
2. Toll Free numbers help you respond to your business needs
   You can route inbound calls to the right location which lets you match callers to the right call agents. Plus, our unsurpassed support team are always around to think with you about new ideas and support you in case of issues.
3. Toll Free numbers help you to trace your marketing efforts
   With features like call tracking, you can optimalize campaigns around already known call volumes, leading to an improved return on marketing investment (ROMI).
4. Toll Free numbers expands your inbound call capacity
   Using international business phone numbers makes it simple to manage staffing, ensuring that your specialized call agents are available to the customers who need them, minimizing call queuing.
5. Toll Free numbers lower the cost of call handling
   TeleForwarding offers you an all-in-one solution, bundling the best services from Tier 1 providers, at the lowest cost.

TeleForwarding is your one-stop-shop solutions for all things telecom

At TeleForwarding, we have the resources to implement free hotline numbers  and toll free numbers, and virtual local phone numbers.

Our trusted specialists are happy to talk through costs and best features for the number(s) you want to implement in the wake of this COVID-19 outbreak.

There are a number of additional features available:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Do you receive a large volume of simultaneous incoming calls ? The Call Queue feature allows efficient call routing, especially during busy periods. You can even add targeted messages and hold music for high volume call times.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

Face to face meetings are not the only option when conducting business, especially during a possible pandemic. Here’s how you can continue to maintain collegial and client relationships, with teleconferencing.

Teleconferencing with International Colleagues and Clients

We need to keep up our workflows and maintain communication with our (international) partners. It is imperative if we want to maintain our economy. Now is the perfect time to (re-)implement the teleconference in your daily meetings.

Instead of cancelling already scheduled international meetings, set up a toll free number or virtual number so your colleagues and clients can dial-in to your conference calls. This will allow you to keep doing business as usual, despite travel and potential health restrictions.

In a local setting, it allows you to maintain communication with your direct colleagues. Perhaps your company advises to work from home. Or that only 2 people can sit together in a meeting room at the same time. The implementation of a virtual number allows business to continue as usual with teleconferencing in the face of these types of decisions.

Your One-Stop-Shop Solution is… Right Here!

At TeleForwarding, we have the resources to implement free hotline numbers  and toll free numbers, and virtual phone numbers.

Our trusted specialists are happy to talk through costs and best features for the number(s) you want to implement in the wake of this COVID-19 outbreak.

There are a number of additional features available:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Do you receive a large volume of simultaneous incoming calls ? The Call Queue feature allows efficient call routing, especially during busy periods. You can even add targeted messages and hold music for high volume call times.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

Check out our other articles about how hotline phone numbers, toll free numbers, and/or virtual local phone numbers can help your business through a global health crisis: Toll free hotlines for healthy safety information and Communications amidst the Coronavirus Outbreak.

Amidst the fear of the COVID-19 outbreak your trusted telecoms specialists at TeleForwarding wanted to send out a simple reminder: in uncertain times your comms policy is important. In this article, we highlight employee comms and inventory coms.

Internal Comms: Employees

Larger companies can set up a toll free hotline for their employees to anonymously disclose their proximity to and/or symptoms of the novel coronavirus. This helps to keep HR and compliance teams up to date with the health of their staff. Toll free hotline numbers can also give the option for employees to listen to a prerecorded message (via an IVR menu). Messages can have the most up to date information about health and safety policies, for instance. Or to disclose potential employee exposure to COVID-19. Global operating multinationals can have the same sort of toll free numbers. Extra options could include cancellation details about upcoming trainings or conferences.

External Comms: Inventory

Brands and manufacturers can also set up a free hotline number for their distributors for information about expected restocking. With mass panic comes unnecessary “panic shopping”, leaving stores unprepared and out of stock. Products like non-perishable food items, medication, cleaning products, even toilet paper are the most common to sell out quickly. Having a toll free hotline for inventory allows distributors to give the correct information to the stores they stock. Consequently, these stores can relay the information to customers looking for certain products.

Your One-Stop-Shop Solution is… Right Here!

At TeleForwarding, we have the resources to implement toll free hotlines, and virtual phone numbers.

Our trusted specialists are happy to talk through costs and best features for the number(s) you want to implement in the wake of this COVID-19 outbreak.

There are a number of additional features available:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Do you receive a large volume of simultaneous incoming calls ? The Call Queue feature allows efficient call routing, especially during busy periods. You can even add targeted messages and hold music for high volume call times.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

Check out our other articles about how hotline phone numbers, toll free numbers, and/or virtual local phone numbers can help your business through a global health crisis: Toll free hotlines for health safety information.

On the Home Front

Municipal Symptom Disclosure Municipalities can set up emergency toll free hotlines to ensure that residents can anonymously call in and notify officials when they have symptoms of COVID-19. Call agents can direct residents to self-quarantine and/or go to the closest testing facility, for instance.

National Information Hotlines Toll free hotlines can also be implemented for residents to call in and acquire the most up to date information available from municipal, state, and federal governments about how the outbreak is being handled. Implement these hotlines for information such as risk level and in the event of a (city) lockdown.

Big Pharma, Manufacturing, and Distribution

Pharmaceutical companies can first set up toll free hotline numbers for their distributors to disclose any changes or delays in product import/export, since manufacturers may be in highly effected countries such as Singapore or China.

Moreover, an international hotline number  for coronavirus can be set up for pharmacies to call and ask about distribution delays. Having this information is beneficial to customers asking when their (regular) medications will be available to pick up.

Your One-Stop-Shop Solution is… Right Here!

At TeleForwarding, we have the resources to implement toll free hotline numbers and virtual phone numbers.

Our trusted specialists are happy to talk through costs and best features for the number(s) you want to implement in the wake of this COVID-19 outbreak.

There are a number of additional features available:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Do you receive a large volume of simultaneous incoming calls ? The Call Queue feature allows efficient call routing, especially during busy periods. You can even add targeted messages and hold music for high volume call times.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

We see it so often: Companies who have a mix of different services providers for different types of phone numbers – a 1800 number at their main supplier, local phone numbers at a variety of international telecommunications providers. Dealing with telecoms providers in the same time zone is hard enough, using providers outside the USA are harder to reach with different opening times due to time differences, multiple contact persons, languages, currencies and legislations. Having your numbers spread across so many different providers leads to plenty of paper work, including invoices, and, even worse, not knowing who to call when you have a problem.

TeleForwarding is Your One-Stop-Shop for Voice Service

TeleForwarding offers you a mix of 1800 numbers, international toll free numbers, national local phone numbers and foreign local phone numbers in over 150 countries spread across the Globe – all at the lowest prices in the game. We bundle all the services you currently receive in one package, as well as ordering any new numbers you may need, and manage them all on your behalf with a single contract. Our trusted specialists are always available by phone, email, or via chat on our website. Additionally, you will receive all invoices in USD so you’ll never have to worry about figuring out the conversions.

Port your numbers to TeleForwarding in 4 simple steps

1. Fill out a Number Porting Request form
   Let us know if you need virtual local phone number and/or international free phone numbers so we can write up a detailed price proposition for you. If you provide us with your current phone numbers, the corresponding countries where they are active, and the current amount of traffic per line, we can give you a detailed cost comparison, too, so you can see the savings!
2. Let us do a phone number portability check.
   When you’ve signed the contract, you’ll have given us permission to go ahead and have your number(s) ported. Don’t worry, your numbers will always stay active during the process. Once your number(s) has/have been successfully ported, you’ll receive a confirmation from us.

Number Porting Request

Need a hand? No worries. Contact us today to find out whether or not it makes sense to make the switch. Our sales experts are happy guide you through the simple process of porting your existing phone numbers over to TeleForwarding. You can rely on and trust our guaranteed 100% line continuity in the porting process, and a controlled transfer at no cost.

Switch to TeleForwarding today and transform your life:

•       Activate your Local and International numbers today (available in 150 countries)
•       Guaranteed lower prices (up to 40% cost savings)
•       Guaranteed service continuity (99.999% availability!)
•       Our trusted specialists are always happy to help
•       No cost switching (your invoices are always in USD)
•       Cancel anytime (no hidden termination fees)

Like most companies, you are constantly evaluating your investments and efforts for efficacy and target reaching, right? Marketing campaigns are some of the most important places to do these types of evaluations. Too many times we focus only on evaluating website or newsletter data because it’s easily accessible and easy to analyse. However, studies show that the phone is not dead in marketing! Consumers still prefer picking up the phone to contact a company to get advice, give their opinion or ask for information.

Phone numbers are part of the marketing strategy

With that said, it’s important to remember to evaluate the success of incoming phone calls. When investing in toll free numbers, what you want is to analyse whether the toll free numbers are being used as intended and if it’s being done efficiently. This can be easily done by implementing call tracking.

You can easily run these diagnostics with our online dashboard. Our IVR landscape allows customers to view and track call statistics to do such analyses. Different functions help to analyse the call even before answering the phone, such as where the call is coming from. Here, we’ll share the many possibilities how call tracking is beneficial to your company.

Improve call centre efficiency

Prior to taking a call, a voice recording share information about the country of origin of the call, what the caller has chosen on your touch-key menu, and/or which hotline the call is coming from. Having this information is valuable for many reasons. First, it makes it possible for your team to know in which language to answer calls, perfect for multinational business dealings. Second, your team will know precisely how to help callers with the detailed information provided. This can be especially helpful for call centres receiving calls from multiple lines. 

Improve client relations

You can also improve your relationship to your existing clients. With call tracking, the caller can be identified before taking the call, allowing you to address them by name. Moreover, the client’s data can be immediately accessed in your data system as it can be coupled with the incoming calls, saving time. This kind of personalisation is priceless when it comes to customer satisfaction!

Evaluation of customer service and phone numbers

Calls can also be evaluated after they’re done. After the call, you can access statistics such as length of the call, how long the call took, how quickly it was answered, how long the caller had to wait to be answered, and if (and/or how many) calls were missed while you were on the line. 

You want to know which phone lines and products bring in the most traffic or which country the call are coming in from? Call tracking makes this possible. With access to call tracking, you can check if and where marketing campaigns are succeeding and subsequently where you should increase your marketing efforts. In case of an emergency hotline, you can also check in which countries the hotline has been called the most.

Interesting in learning about all the possibilities of call tracking and how it can increase your company’s efficiency? Contact us today!

All day long we hear commercials calling out “call us toll free!” or “contact us on our free hotline numbers”. The relationship between these different types of telephone numbers is confusing; hotline numbers can be 800 numbers, but a toll free number isn’t always a hotline number. Have we lost you yet?

The first thing to know about both types of numbers is this: They can be called at no cost to the caller.

What are toll free numbers?

In 1967, the United States saw the assignment of toll free numbers to large companies for special events with high volumes of incoming calls, to protect usual day-to-day incoming business calls. These toll free numbers were handled by dedicated in-house teams, or outsourced to call centers. Eventually, larger companies were able to select their own number instead, leading to a rise in popularity.

Substantial growth came with the introduction of easy to dial phone numbers like 1-800-555-1234, and Vanity phone numbers like 1-800- CALLNOW (1-800-225-5669). Soon enough, small and medium-sized businesses found their way to toll free numbers as well. In the early 90s, the FCC began to offer number porting: meaning that companies could keep their toll free numbers when moving or changing service providers.

Simply speaking, toll free numbers cost nothing for its user. It’s generally a 1-800 number, used as an added value service number where callers can call for free, from anywhere, and all costs are paid by the organization who is offering the service line. These lines are used as support lines to help with substantive questions and/or complaints. That’s why, when calling their toll free numbers, a lot of organizations’ Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems ask you to select a reason for calling before directing you to the right department.

What are hotline numbers?

Historically, hotlines refer to direct communication lines. Pop culture has given us the idea that a red telephone exists that could be immediately directed to important parties in times of war. Nowadays, free hotline numbers in telecoms refers to phone numbers used for large scale incoming calls, often in times of urgency, without fear of a service disruption.

These days, hotline phone numbers are commonly set up as exceptional and special events lines to connect people in need for specific information. In the case of large scale crises, like product recalls or the current COVID-19 crisis, they are set via toll free numbers. These hotline numbers ensure that a) the proper information is accessible to anyone who needs it and b) that anyone who needs to share pertinent information has a designated place to do so.

So what is the difference between toll free numbers and free hotline numbers? The difference is rooted in the amount of incoming calls an organization expects and is able to handle without service disruption.

It’s interesting to see how often it comes up in the news these days that we are damaging the planet with excessive travel. At the end of 2018, we brought you our Series on Sustainability. In the series, we explained the basics of climate change and how business travel can cause harmful effects on the environment.

Approximately 600 trees need to be planted to replenish the Earth’s oxygen levels one cross-country flight between New York and San Francisco. At 41 flights between these destinations, that’s a whopping 24,600 trees to be planted per day!

However, companies continue to send their employees on cross-country business meetings. As the economy grows, costs rise. Soon enough, small and medium sized companies won’t be able to keep up with their large counterparts. Travel expenses may be pennies to a large company, but it could lead a small or medium sized business to bankruptcy.

There are plenty of ways we hope and wish that governments and businesses will make changes to frequency that we travel. We would love to see a world where everyone is making small steps in their everyday life to help save the only planet we have!

One possibility to offset the demands of travel are business telephonic solutions.

Use your virtual PBX

Having access to the virtual PBX means your employees can work from anywhere. This can allow you to hire people who live in other cities without worrying about footing the cost of travel. When there is an important conference to attend cross-country or overseas, whoever makes the trip can easily communicate with the office.

Local phone numbers

To minimize travel between business meetings, we can help you set up local phone numbers. This allows your distant colleagues and clients to contact you without having to pay the long-distance costs. And, for urgent situations, this is a great solution to emergency travel for meetings.

Conference call-in numbers

Avoid traveling cross-country by making use of conference calls rather than face-to-face meetings. Those invited to the conference call can access it through a bridge number. This is a number they can call to connect to the teleconference from wherever they are. This gives you less of a need for frequent meetings, and your business travel expenses will be considerably lower.

A bonus to all of these solutions? By engaging in less business travel, your company’s carbon footprint will decrease dramatically! Saving money and saving the planet? We call that a win-win situation!

Contact us today to learn about these solutions and more.