I now have a cellphone plan, where all outgoing calls are metered and very expensive, except for unlimited calls to 3 favorite numbers, which are included in the plan. For our international calling, we are already using a discount carrier activated through a dial prefix, which also supports a local land-line dial-in access to be usable from mobile phones. By declaring the access number as one of my favorites, I can make unlimited calls from my mobile phone at the substantially lower rate of the discount carrier. The only problems is that making calls through the indirection of a voice-prompt menu is very cumbersome!
This is where Phonecard Express comes in. This highly customizeable application inserts itself almost transparently as a filter between the Android system dialer and the telephony subsystem. Whether a call is made from the dialer, the address book or any other intent, the call setup is intercepted and potentially routed through a calling card service. In addition to supporting multiple cards and their specific call setup sequences (access numbers, voice prompt, PIN, etc) Phonecard Express also supports various policies which control which calls are routed through which calling card account or dialed directly. For people who travel internationally and tend to store all numbers in the address book in the GSM style "+" notation, Phonecard Express supports logic to expand the number with a configured international call prefix prefix.
In my setup, I have exception rules for my other two favorite numbers as well as the voicemail access to use direct dialing. For all other cards, the call is automatically routed through discount carrier account. The integration is so seamless and transparent that it is almost scary and the only noticeable drawback over the standard call flow is the noticeable larger post dial delay, partially from loading another application during the call setup flow and from having to dial an access number and key in the number as DMT signals on AVS prompt before the call is really initiated. On the other hand, this is a small price to pay for saving an order of magnitude in per minute calling cost.
Phonecard Express is a great example for the flexibility of the Android platform, where 3rd party applications can very deeply integrated and partially replace default system functionality.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
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Call routing is one of the most beneficial features provided by the eConsole call management system. You can route all incoming calls to any destination number of your choice. If you have many destination numbers, configuring the calls that come to each of these numbers individually may be very tedious and time consuming. Here, the job can be made much simpler by using the special feature of eConsole call management system called Feature Codes.
A Feature Code is nothing but a short combination of numbers that can be used to route all the incoming calls to any of the advanced call management features of eConsole such as Hunt Groups, IVR, Voicemail etc. The Feature Code is applicable to a particular setting, so once the setting has been configured for one destination number, all that you need to do is specify the same feature code setting to any of the other destination numbers for which the relevant call routing pattern is applicable. This prevents a lot of time-consuming manual configuration for the individual numbers.
The eConsole call management system can configure Feature Codes to be used along with 0800 numbers, 0844 numbers, 0845 numbers, 0871 numbers as well as other number ranges.
Routing inbound calls to different destination numbers depending on the time of the day is referred to as Time of day routing plan. Routing inbound calls to your fixed landline office telephone number in the office hours and mobile routing them after office hour is the most common use of this feature. Time of day routing can also be applied to different hunt groups at different hours. You may route daytime inbound calls to your UK call center and after office hours you may route them to your international call center destination. You can also direct calls to international destinations on UK national holidays so that the customers are not left unanswered. For weekends calls can be pointed to voicemail box for customers to leave a voice message.
Time of routing plan thus makes call management feasible while you have hundreds of destination numbers for handling customer calls. For fixed office hours and holidays time of day routing plan can be set at once to manage inbound calls efficiently. Anytime routing can be altered by logging in to online interface as and when the need arises.
Time of day routing is thus an important tool for call management. They are available on all 0800 numbers, 0845 numbers, 0844 numbers and o3 numbers as well.
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