A TELEMARKETING SERVICE came in handy last month when Florida officials needed to tell residents to evacuate an area because of another one of the fires that were raging in the state.
Ormond Beach, FL-based Market Ability Inc. sells a service called RealCall, which allows marketers to make computer-generated calls either for live listeners or to leave answering-machine messages.
The company also markets the service to local governments as RealCall Alert for use in emergency situations. Market Ability wanted to show its hometown what it could do and in July received a list of Ormond Beach residents so it could run a test and pitch its service to city officials. But police there needed the service sooner than anyone thought-that morning.
“We had a couple of subdivisions that we knew were in imminent danger from the fire,” says Mike Judd, a spokesman for the Ormond Beach police department.
Market Ability was able to put a RealCall message together in about 10 minutes, says president Rob Tuttle. Police chief Larry Mathieson recorded a message warning 1,000 residents they needed to evacuate. Market Ability, which had to leave its own premises, did not charge the city for the service.
“We talked to a lot of residents who said they got the call first and then the police officer knocked on the door,” Judd says, noting the city is looking at expanding its use of the system. “It was a great backup if our officers got overrun.”
With RealCall, if the marketer wants to leave only phone-machine messages, it can disconnect if it gets a live person. According to the company, the system reaches answering machines 60% to 65% of the time, and it does not show up on caller ID.
What makes RealCall unique is it detects when the recipient’s outgoing message has finished so it can begin leaving its own. Unlike other systems, it does not leave a cutoff message or a long pause at the beginning of an announcement. Market Ability has applied for a patent on this aspect of its system. The company can now make 300,000 connected calls a day, and expects to be able to do a million by the end of the year Clients include Toyota and Time Warner Cable.
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