The most obvious way to keep your customers happy is to simply be available and easily accessible to them. In reality, not everyone chooses to do so which leads to far too many third-party companies offering services directing callers to a paid number for directory assistance to find and connect them to the company that calling customers are looking for.

A recent Dutch study about this phenomenon found that three out of four calling customers have no idea that they are actually paying for a call to a number for directory assistance. Moreover, an estimated USD 1.50 was spent per household on a paid call forwarding service in 2020.

Create a website from scratch and make your toll free number visible!

When you’re ready to create a website for your company’s domestic and international visitors, make sure you offer easy and quick access to a local toll free number. This shows you care about your website visitors and that you are a bonafide webshop in a sea of malafide webshops – a distinction that has led to more and more countries requiring webshops to provide easy access to their contact numbers and/or chat functions.

As you create a website from scratch, make sure that you or the developer knows how to create a website for each country where you have visitor and/or clients and, preferably, present a domestic toll-free number that is clearly stated in the footer of on your contact page. With a clearly published toll free number, your customers won’t be forced to call a number for directory assistance anymore.

Finally, high customer satisfaction and great client loyalty will result by making your company better and more easily accessible providing a domestic toll free number per country. Your domestic and foreign clients will close deals faster and your company could take advantage of cross- and upsell opportunities offering free of charge access for your happy clients who will come back for more.

TeleForwarding USA can help you make this happen with an one-stop shop telecom provider for business phone numbers in over 100 countries, all under one contract and without needing foreign addresses. We’ll make sure your customers’ experience is hassle-free, by connecting global business to local people!

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.

Chances are that you drive a car and that your car is manufactured by a globally renowned automotive brand. One of the most important relationships is between car owner (or leaser) and the representatives of their automotive brand. Good customer service is essential when making the decision to purchase (or lease) a car. 

As a global automotive brand, there are many ways you can provide an excellent customer experience by providing varied solutions for your customers to contact you by phone.

A single brand image; 

A Universal International Freephone Number (UIFN number) is typically designed for companies with global operations using one phone number that can be contacted from many countries. This is obviously a useful tool when selling cars. A UIFN phone number can route incoming calls to whichever department you want. For example incoming German calls can be automatically directed to a German speaking customer service representative. A UIFN toll free number can also be useful for global marketing campaigns. For the duration of new marketing campaigns, you can set up an expanded recording to the campaign’s initiative, giving the option to be connected with the caller’s closest local dealer for follow-up. Having a single phone number attached to your brand reinforces brand consistency while catering to your global client base.

Call tracking

UIFN phone numbers benefit globally operating companies to measure geographical response and take necessary analytical measurements. Information about the success of a global brand campaign in various countries can be tracked easily and in real-time when calls are answered by the UIFN number. If necessary, immediate action can be made based on this information: an essential element in improving the success rate of campaigns and maintaining a positive brand experience for returning customers, too. 

Sales and Services

UIFN toll free numbers help to consolidate your sales and services efforts. Incoming calls to the UIFN number for test drives and specific car information can help determine the demand of each dealership for support so the manufacturers can be briefed on how to distribute products accordingly. Incoming service and support calls can also be an indicator of how your dealers are performing. Monitoring the type of calls coming in can help with customers’ experience by, for instance, investing why one dealership receives a greater number than average of service calls. When monitoring in a crisis, such as a product recall, the automotive brand can provide extra support to those dealerships that have the most incoming product recall complaints and exchanges.

Customer Service Performance

Certain statistics, specifically how long until an incoming call is answered and duration of a call, can give insight on the performance of your greater customer service team. Since customer service can be correlated to sales targets, call tracking is important and gives valuable insight for how your customer service techniques are working in practice. These statistics can help when evaluating the value of your customer service efforts, improve client relationships, and contribute to brand loyalty by means of returning customers.

This is just the tipping point of the importance of telephony in your day-to-day business operation in the automotive industry. Contact us today to learn how UIFN numbers and call tracking can benefit your automotive company.

Regulations around food safety are falling behind the exponential growth of the food production industry, leading to more and food recall news. The general food recall procedure here in the US is that businesses and food producers must contact the FDA as soon as they are aware of an issue with their product. Once the FDA responds to the notification, the company must disperse the information to the public on their website and through various media channels.The timeline in these scenarios is within 24 hours.

Food recalls due to allergens or even bacterias are becoming more prevalent than in the past. With that said, companies are reporting more and more food recalls as preventative measures, rather than actual illness or, in the worst case, death.

Case Study

A well-known canned vegetable producer and distributor had an unfortunate packaging mishap in 2018. They were in need of an international toll free number within 24 hours of learning that one of their products might have broken glass inside the packaging. They came to TeleForwarding and we were able to provide a turnaround time quicker than the 24 hours they requested.  

Immediate Response is Key

With situations like the Case Study above, it is important to offer an accessible line for consumers to call to find out the exact information they are looking for. And, when calamity is involved, your regular customer service number won’t do the job. Not only can an international toll free number allow your consumers a direct line to the information they need, they can do it without any extra man power on your end. Here’s how:

Voice recordings

By definition, the media uses fear tactics to keep the public’s attention. This is no difference in the event of a food recall. Giving the consumer access to a line specific to food recalls can ease the panic and de-escalate the situation. To minimize your consumers’ worries, you can offer a hotline playing a clear pre-recorded voice message. By offering a message to callers about what to do in case of the calamity often communicated in the media, your consumers will not be panicked because they will get the proper information quickly and easily.

Leave a message

In addition to voice recordings, you can give the consumer the chance to leave a message stating their specific concerns. With Voice2Mail services, you can have these messages transcribed and sent directly to you. This is a great way to collect data about what your consumers are concerned about in relation to your food recall.

These are just a couple of ways a toll free number benefits the food industry when faced with a food recall. Contact us today to learn more.

There are hundreds of ways that you can make use of toll free numbers to benefit your company’s customer service practices. Within the next few weeks, we will show you some of the ways companies can apply toll free numbers in different industries.

There are many situations in the health and pharmaceutical industries which call for users to report their information and experiences. You can use a toll free number to report user experience in a number of different ways.

Reporting in clinical trials

In large scale clinical trials, you often have thousands of participants. Instead of having them log their personal information and side effects to submit after the duration of the trial, you could implement a round the clock toll free number. A toll free number benefits trial participants because they can call in their personal statistics and information as they happen. These toll free numbers can be fully automated with a fixed script in the caller’s language, with spoken or keyed in instructions. It can even be individualized per caller. Since these lines are available to many callers simultaneously, it is a good way to keep researchers constantly updated about the data and the patients’ experiences.

Reporting personal statistics

Try implementing a service line specifically for recording personal statistics that patients can measure at home like weight, blood pressure, blood sugars, etc. This saves the patient the effort of having to use online portals or applications. Portals and apps require technological access and certain cognitive abilities that not all members of your clinical trial will necessarily have. A toll free number benefits older people who are not technologically savvy. It gives them the chance to call in and use the touch tone instructions to enter their personal information.

Reporting side effects

It is no secret that medications have side effects. Many people report their side effects to their health care providers but not to the pharmaceutical companies. Imagine the wealth of data that you can collect by offering a universal international toll free number for people to call and report their side effects. Additionally, customers’ as well as the societies trust will be increased.

These are just a few of the ways a toll free number benefits the health and pharmaceutical industries. Contact us today to learn more or to receive individual solutions for your needs.