Sending a Voice Blast or Voice Broadcast

Voice Blasts or a Voice Broadcast are a relatively new concept in communications. Traditionally if you wanted to communicate with many people at once by phone you would arrange a conference call, or simply call them one at a time. Some organizations developed phone trees to pass along important information or news. I recall one organization I was in at one time would give each person the responsibility of calling two or three others if there was an event cancellation due to weather or some other reason. This was time consuming and although many times it worked, sometimes the chain would fail because someone didn't receive the message to pass along, or failed to fulfill their responsibility by keeping their contacts informed of the cancellation.

Today however, technology has brought us a great alternative to these time consuming and unreliable ways of spreading voice messages to many people. It has become known as the voice blast or voice broadcast. It is also popularly known of as robo-calling because the calls are done automatically by a computer. Now, technically the idea of recording a voice message and then autodialing number after number to play it is not a brand new concept and goes back before the voice over ip era. However, the number of companies offering voip services which sometimes include outbound voice broadcast messages has really made this technology available to the masses in a way that was really never before possible.

I have used a voice blast service on a number of occasions. I teach private lessons most days of the week and have as many as 8 students a day. Some of them are adults, some are children and for the children, they have two parents and each parent has several phone numbers that they can be reache at. So, I have as many as probably 5 phone numbers that I can pass along a message for each student. The better phone to call may depend on the day of the week, or week of the month. In many cases, they couldn't tell me which number would be best to reach them at any given time, so for me it's a safe bet to try them all one after the other. So, why would I need to call them all? Well, I've had occasions where I was sick and needed to cancel the appointments and certainly didn't feel like spending 2 hours making phone calls to accomplish the task. On one occasion my wife had given birth to my second son and I needed to tell all of my students not to expect me until a certain date.

These kinds of messages though can be very useful for schedule change announcements, reminders of upcoming events, even surveys. Most companies that provide these voice blast services will allow you to have interactive calls that can include a survey for collecting information or even a number to press to talk to a live operator. This would call a number that you have specified so for instance if you were doing a product survey and also selling the product they could talk to a salesperson. I haven't taken advantage of all of the possible uses for voice broadcasting, but for the uses I have taken advantage of it has saved me a significant amount of time. I only paid pennies for each successful call as well!

Well, usually what happens is that the person that wants to send out the message starts by opening an account with a company that provides voice broadcast or voice blast services.  Some of these services require setup fees and monthly commitments, but many have pay as you go plans.  I used voiceshot to setup my service and they offer pay as you go plans.  I was able to transfer $5 into my account so that I would have credit to make the calls.

Next I compiled a list of the people I wanted to get a message to and their phone numbers.  That was easy enough to enter online, although you could enter this information into a spreadsheet and then upload it to your voice provider.  In most cases they will support CSV files which are comma seperated value files.  This means your file will have a name, then a comma, then a phone number for each line.  The structure may vary depending on your service provider so be sure to read their suggestions on how to get your phone number information uploaded.

Finally I was able to record a message, choose which list to send it to (if you have multiple lists) and schedule a time for the voice broadcast to go out.  I was able to record the message and launch the call over the phone, but I could have recorded and used the computer to launch the phone calls.  One thing that was really nice about Voiceshot's service is that I could see the progress of the calls update in the web interface as it happened.  It would note which calls were successful and if I recall correctly it even tagged which ones where voice mail messages left and which were live pickups.

My biggest use of a voice blast was when my second son was born and it seems as though I made about 30-40 phone calls in around 5 minutes or so.  Believe me that was time and money well spent in comparison to the hours it could have taken me to do the same myself.  I have become, as you can see, a big fan of the concept of using voice broadcasts to get the word out, perhaps because I am interested in finding ways to use todays technology to save time and money!