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Click To Call
Monday, May 05, 2008
Click To Call is a feature that many services are starting to offer. Instead of a customer picking up a phone to dial you, the customer clicks on a link. The customer is taken to a page where they enter their telephone number, and possibly other information about the transaction. When they click submit, their telephone rings and they are connected. It is similar in principle to the Make A Call page on voip.com.
One reason why Click to Call is desirable: it's actually cheaper than an 800 number. An 800 number is a free call for the people that are calling, but it's by no means free to the business or person paying for the 800 number. Paying for what ends up being two calls and bridging them is actually cheaper than what a typical 800 number charges per-minute.
Second is that with Click to Call, you have the opportunity to collect more data before the call is even made. Instead of just having customers blindly dialing into your 800 number and have to navigate the phone tree in order to get to the right person, you can collect a lot information up-front to route the call to the right person and shorten the amount of time it takes to handle that call.
A third reasons you might consider Click to Call, particularly as an individual, is that you don't want to expose your real telephone number, yet provide a way for people to talk to you in realtime for free. Click to call hides your real telephone number. In some cases, it can also hide the person's telephone number who is calling, making the system "double blind" in a sense.
Of course, this technology has some challenges. It won't work if the person initiating the click-to-call doesn't have a direct dial telephone number, such as in some office environments or in hotels. Even so, Click to Call is a nice feature to be able to provide.
