#5 | Country Specific Toll-Free Numbers
Let’s countdown the five solutions for international calls. The number five way that I’m going to talk about to get into conference calls is by dialing the toll-free number for that specific country. The way it works is that there is a different phone number with each country. You’ll see on this slide here there’s actually five different numbers list here, but all for Australia. The first two are different 800 numbers, but again, this is an international toll-free number. The next three are what’s called local numbers. The way that works is they call from their phone into these numbers and then they use the exact same conference ID that they would normally be using if they had been inside the US. Some of these are mobile-enabled. We’re seeing more and more end users on mobile phones, and that is another complication that you need to be aware of. Some phone numbers are specifically enabled for mobile end points.
Trade-offs, though, in using this are several. There’s a lot of flexibility for the attendees. There’s multiple numbers and that’s important, because if they’re running late they can get into the call when they’re ready. They may not be ready at the designated time. They might be three minutes late so they want to be able to dial in themselves. To have multiple numbers means that whether they’re on a mobile phone or this carrier or that carrier doesn’t matter because you’re guaranteed a connection when those different numbers are on different carriers.
However, there are some drawbacks. One is that for some types of calls you may want more of a red carpet experience. That means that you may want to dial out to the participant instead of having them dial in. Use cases for this are staff meetings where everyone’s internal or part of a regular ongoing call and they know these numbers, they know which one works for them specifically.
#4 | Dial the toll number
Let’s keep going. Number four: the next way to get into an international call would be dial the toll number. The account you have should have both an 800 number and a toll number both. The toll number does work all over the world, worldwide. Anyone can dial into that. The drawback, though, is that it’s a very expensive call for your attendee. If and attendees are partners or customers, this is typically not what you want to do. Even if they’re internal staff in another location this is generally going to be a much more expensive way for you to have them join into the call. We recommend other solutions typically for those types of scenarios.
#3 | Operator call out
Number three: have the operator call out. The way it works is the operator is available to dial your call for you. This is very common for basically every provider, not something just exclusive to us. If you’ve done this you’ll find that it’s a nice way to go. You can focus on the call and do your talking and let the provider do, I say here, the dirty work. Not really dirty work but you’ll find that sometimes it can take a little bit of time to get people into a call.
All you should need to be able to do is press star zero and that would bring an operator into the call. That is an interruption, though. One thing you might want to look at is doing it via chat. That way you can give them the information over chat and you can stay involved in the conversation that’s going on. The way it works is either by star zero or by chat you would give the operator the information, the name, the phone numbers. We do recommend having multiple numbers just in case they get voicemail. This is a more formal way, and oftentimes that’s a nice way to do it if you’re a law firm. Some companies do research types of calls or client or prospect types of calls where they want a little bit more formality. This is a nice way to do it to have the operator involved then.
Also, if there’s ever challenges, (if you’re calling for example maybe not the UK but in Africa, sometimes in developing countries people could experience quality issues), having the operator involved can really help. The operators typically have many different routing capabilities to connect your call. They can also monitor the call. This is, again, something that would be recommended if you’ve experienced any type of connection challenge in the past. Come back tomorrow to find out what the top two solutions are!
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