1,600 Staffing Industry Accounts & Over 160,000,000 Messages

Call-Em-All has been a partner to staffing firms going all the way back to the founding of our company 10 years ago. In fact, we’ve partnered with over 1,600 staffing accounts since we opened for business. Even more impressive is that we’ve helped these staffing firms deliver over 160 million messages to their associates! When it comes to automated messaging for the staffing industry, Call-Em-All is the hands down leader in the space.

How does our service help the staffing industry?
We connect employees with important information about job openings, shift changes, timesheet reminders, and event dates.  Firms are able to reach hundreds or thousands of associates with a single broadcast message in just a fraction of the time it would take to make those calls or texts individually. It makes us proud to know that our service is contributing to the economy in such a positive way and knowing that so many people are finding work through our technology.

Why does the staffing industry choose to work with Call-Em-All?
You don’t get to be the leader in the industry without a great product or outstanding support, and we have both. Our platform is reliable, functions smoothly, and can handle more than 3,000 messages per minute. We keep things simple and easy to use, and our approach to customer experience is to be direct, straightforward, and honest while solving our customer’s problems. Call-Em-All isn’t just a calling service, we’re a company who cares. On the product side, we’ve worked with the leaders in the staffing industry to develop a robust feature set that simply works. Furthermore, we’ve partnered with companies like Avionte, Bond, Bridgeware, TempWorks and many others to integrate our service into their existing software platforms. This way, all of their clients can take advantage of our automated calling and texting solutions.

Here are some other stats we found in our data;

• Top 5 States by Message Count: Delaware, California, Ohio, Texas, Indiana
• Top 5 States by Total Staffing Firms: California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Ohio

If you are in the staffing industry, chances are you are already using us – if you aren’t, you can also meet us in person at Staffing World in San Diego or Executive Forum in February.

If you’d like to learn more about our product or schedule a webinar with one of our team members, please fill out the form below;

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Efficient Appointment Reminders

Physicians can record a voice message reminding their patients that it’s time to make an appointment. Patients can press a button to connect with the office or call to schedule their flu shot. Rather than call patients individually, the message can be sent to an office’s entire patient list at one time. In just a few minutes, an office can communicate efficiently to all of their patients.

“We had over 700 reminder calls to make for our seasonal flu vaccine, and this allowed us to do it with ease.”
–Christa Shilling, MI

Here are some other good uses for healthcare professionals who want to use an automated messaging service:

• Annual Checkups
• Staffing Notifications
• Research Opportunities
• Wellness Tips
• Clinic Availability

A few things are new this season that physicians may want to consider telling patients about:

1. Only injectable flu shots are recommended
2. Vaccines have been updated to match current strains
3. Egg allergy recommendations have changed
4. Special does for older people

Everyone 6 months and older should get a flu vaccine every year by the end of October, if possible. However, getting vaccinated later is OK. Vaccination should continue throughout the flu season, even in January or later. Some children, who have received flu vaccine previously and children who have only received one dose in their lifetime, may need two doses of flu vaccine. A health care provider can advise on how many doses a child should get.

Here are some more frequently asked questions from the CDC.

Visit our website to learn more about Call-Em-All and how we help Health Care professionals communicate important information quickly and effectively.

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At this point, some of you are probably rolling your eyes and thinking, “Yeah okay, Jon, but you have no right to complain. You work for a robocalling company!” Yes, I do work at Call-Em-All, a company dedicated to helping people communicate important through automated voice and text messages. I’m proud to be here, too! This may seem a bit ironic at first, but hear me out because most don’t know that Call-Em-All is actually a force for good, not evil.

SPAM is bad, but automated messaging really helps people.

Now it’s one thing to preach openly about good intentions and quite another to live those convictions out loud, so I want to provide a glimpse at how a robocalling service like ours can be good. At Call-Em-All, when a potential user comes to our team looking to use our service, one of the first items we cover with them is how they are hoping to use our services as well as an explanations of the types of calls we do not send. Should the calls in question be of the type that we can service, fantastic! Welcome to the Call-Em-All family! Should the calls be of a kind that go against how we operate, then that’s the end of the discussion, no matter how nice of a business opportunity for Call-Em-All it may be.

There is no way around it: Call-Em-All does not transmit broadcasts of a promotional nature, those that could lead to a financial transaction, or mass political calls.

Around the clock every day of the year, Call-Em-All’s Customer Experience team actively monitors and reviews calls going out on our platform to ensure that our guidelines are being met. There is a zero tolerance policy among our staff in an effort to not only protect ourselves, but to also protect our users who truly have valuable, time-sensitive, even emergency-based information that needs to be communicated. Our President, Brad Herrmann, even went the extra mile to meet with representatives from the FCC, the very organization that regulates mass-communication, to ensure that our model was by the book and that our usage was deemed appropriate in their eyes.

Jason, one of our Customer Experience team members, had this to say about Call-Em-All’s activism in this arena: “True activism is not easy. In many cases it will cost a business… to be part of a cause. It takes actually caring in order for a business to successfully carry out true activism. Here at Call-Em-All, we invest a lot of time in both programming and customer support to battle these spam calls.”

Recently, the Wall-Street Journal wrote an article about robocalls, specifically about how easy it is to spam unsuspecting people with unwanted phone calls. It was a truly insightful, investigative piece that speaks volumes in relation to the robocalling industry. I mention this because Call-Em-All was brought up in the article. As its author discovered, when someone creates a Call-Em-All account, we ask them to agree to our Terms of Use which highlight the types of calls that cannot, under any circumstance, go out over our platform. In this instance, the author of the Wall Street Journal article was able to send out a funny test broadcast to a few friends, but her second attempt was blocked by our system.

Should someone lie about their intentions, our safety nets are still in place to ensure bad, unwanted spam calls will not go out with Call-Em-All’s help. Like many things Call-Em-All related, my team feels immense pride being the good guys of the industry.

Should you ever find yourself in Call-Em-All’s offices, you’ll find our Manifesto – a living document written by our employees documenting the very principles upon which we stand – painted upon one of our walls. There is one line in particular that speaks volumes on the type of person, and company, every member of our team aspires to be: “We use our powers for good not evil.” We are proud that our processes stop unwanted spam calls before they start. It’s why we’re able to go to sleep at night. We know that the messages transmitting around the clock aren’t computers asking for fake monies owed to the IRS, informing others of fake inheritances waiting to be collected, or telling others who they should vote for in the next election, but information that our users wants to send and their audiences want to receive.

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Long Code

Long codes have been designated by mobile carriers strictly for one-to-one communication. Carriers have decided that long codes should not be used for any large volume, marketing, or business applications. Carriers actively monitor activity on long codes, so sending too many texts at once via long code may result in shutdown of the long code. This is why you’ll find long code providers limiting the size of the group you can contact via an individual text broadcast. Essentially, long codes are for those who want to communicate directly one-to-one/few.

Short Code

Short codes were designed by phone carriers to be the proper, professional method for sending texts to a mass amount of contacts. They’re what we at Call-Em-All utilize for sending text campaigns. Short codes are the most expensive option for sending texts. Additionally, any provider of short code texting has to go through a rigorous vetting process and have a strict set of rules and regulations to abide by. Sometimes the opt-in requirements for using a short code seem overly burdensome, but users really have no choice.  Short codes were designed with marketers in mind.  

So, while designing only for marketers may have been short-sighted, the restrictions are understandable and do work to keep unwanted texts off of the powerful short code platform. What this means for those reaching a mass audience via short code is that there isn’t a limit to the amount of people you can reach out to, the speed and efficiency is much higher than sending over long code, and short code users have the support of carriers. Essentially, short code is the only method for delivering texts to a large audience.

While neither Short Codes or Long Codes are perfect, the carriers have managed to keep US cell phones relatively SPAM-free by closely monitoring long code usage and forcing large volumes to the formally administered short code system.

Here’s a summary of the differences:                         

The most interesting part for us at Call-Em-All is that texting laws and regulations are still being worked out by the FCC, our courts, and the cellular industry itself. Our founders have made a point to meet with the FCC in the past to help shape the conversation around the automated calling industry, and we look forward to joining the discussion on texting as we move forward. This is especially important when taking into consideration the penalties for incorrect text usage, where shut downs and fines of up to $1,500 per message are common.

We hope this post helps you understand your options for sending texts. If you find yourself having any lingering questions or want to join the conversation, reach out to us and help create the automated broadcasting environment that you envision. For more information, check out what The Wireless Association has to say.

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My onboarding experiences with previous jobs have often been that I get handed a book of definitions in order to learn how the company functions. This would then normally be followed by some guidance from an appointed person who followed their own agenda on what they found to be most important, in no particular order I might add. I must admit, I have been involved in similar processes in the past as both a trainer and trainee.

When I came to work for Call-Em-All, many things made me realize this was a special place. Some details were clear as day but some aspects I found along the way. As I periodically discovered special company traditions, I wish I would have known about them from the start. I would also feel left out when I didn’t know the background to the stories of important Call-Em-All historic references.

At Call-Em-All we all agree that if something is not working, expressing feedback and taking action is more than welcomed. We use our formula, our internal equation for success, in many projects to hold ourselves accountable and to focus on our tasks. Onboarding was no different. I took on a project and applied one of our formulas point and embraced some healthy conflict. I did not hold back when it came to my passion about creating a better onboarding experience. It was nothing personal with what we had now, but I felt that the process was outdated and cluttered. Feedback from other new employees supported these thoughts.

With our company quickly growing in numbers, it would be an injustice to continue the same practice. I didn’t want any more people to miss out on the details that make us a distinct place to work. To guide my train of thought, I had to ask myself the following questions and think of honest answers:

Does the new employee walk away from day one with a clear understanding of our culture?

At our company, culture is the product of our greatest resource: the people. We, the people, have come together several times to draft defining statements including our manifesto, values, and formula. More than just words on a wall, there were specific people, methods, resources, and reading materials that led to all of us stacking hands on these statements that outline the way we approach business and our customers. If the core factor of a company is culture, like ours is, onboarding needs to have a dedicated review and history of the defining moments.  There should be a true comprehension of knowing where the company came from, not just knowing the name of the founders and their credentials.

Does the new member know the product or service?

This might seem like an obvious question, but think back to a time when someone was hired for a position that may have not been customer-facing. Their projects might take them in a direction that would never require dealing with the actual product itself. In our first week of onboarding, we wanted to make sure that everyone from our interns to office administrators to our newest engineers had gone through a sample use of the basics of our service. As a result, our hope is that they will always keep the customer’s point of view in mind.

Is the current training material a checklist for myself or something a new hire needs to accomplish?

With onboarding being fairly infrequent, our training materials tended to include things that only needed to be done once and never seen again (creating an email address, setting up the office phone, preparing a computer, etc.). All these things need to be accomplished when someone is hired, but they can be assigned to a different team member prior to the start date. Here at Call-Em-All we designed a Pre-Onboarding Checklist. The team member who is assigned this task should already be familiar with what needs to be done. The most important thing is that there is a hard deadline. Redistributing tasks like these helps make day one seamless for the new hire.

Does the training material provide some structure?

Depending on the appointed trainer, you can quickly gauge their good or bad habits and the tools that they are most familiar with. To assure all important details are highlighted, it’s helpful to note the goals of each training day. During our new onboarding at Call-Em-All, we have an agenda that is a basic outline of a new hire’s training days. Any person assigned to help with training on a given day will know the goals that need to be accomplished so there’s not much room for unfocused topics.

Feedback – Does it work? What has to be changed?

As any company continues to grow, it is only natural to expect changes in your onboarding process. Consider onboarding a prime opportunity to evolve your processes. Assigned goals or training examples are perfect opportunities to experience, what we at Call-Em-All, call a win-win opportunity. This means that the training is communicated to the new hire and in return they provide feedback for a better understanding or explanation of the training materials. While this practice is encouraged along the way, we made it a point to have a quick mini-meeting after a month for a full rundown to help continue the evolution of our onboarding process.

By no means do we declare that we’ve discovered the best training plan ever. But it has covered a lot of areas we were lacking. I can almost guarantee that this is not the end of our onboarding approach. We can all relate to inefficiencies in old training methods. I hope that the questions above spark a self-evaluation of the last onboarding experience you may have been a part of or witnessed.

More importantly, if we have only a limited amount of time with an intern or an employee, at the end of the day, we hope they can walk away with learning about the key factors that make our company unique. We hope our silly traditions and strategies when approaching business can influence future decisions or trigger intelligent conversations.

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In my former life I was a band director teaching 6th grade through 12th grade students each day. I desired something a little different (okay, quite a bit different), so I pivoted to software engineering. To make this work I enrolled in a code school in Austin called The Iron Yard. Since switching gears to become a software engineer, I have a unique perspective. I have a lot of experience leading young people and being on a staff of other leaders. As such, I enjoy working on smaller teams that enjoy each other’s company and have a good work/family balance.

With high standards in mind, I looked through the multitude of job offerings in the Dallas area. Few companies jumped out at me that matched my criteria. An online friend pointed me towards a job posting on the LaunchDFW.com job board for Call-Em-All. I began to comb the company website. When I read through the company’s manifesto, I had an epiphany. This is a company where I could see myself as a software engineer.

My entire interview and hiring process was enjoyable. I loved talking with Brad and Hai to learn how my skills fit in with their needs. When I asked questions, I could instantly hear their passion about the company and the service that they provide. The entire engineering team was part of my live interview. I picked up on the fact that everyone has a good sense of pride about what the company has accomplished. I also sensed that the leaders had the humility to make changes to experience growth, both for the company and the whole team.

Just after my 15th wedding anniversary, I accepted a job at Call-Em-All. Great anniversary gift! Day one was fantastic. The engineering team took me out to lunch. I had some activities to learn about the history of the company as well as the product. I met everyone in the company and began to study and use the calling platform more deeply. It was a stark difference to my previous environment as a teacher. I felt like I was walking through a fairy tale, and I continue to feel that way!

The perks of working here: no politics, honest feedback, open communication, great benefits, fun team rituals, snacks, ping-pong, coffee, standing desks, nerf basketball, cell phone service, lunch on Wednesdays, holding each other accountable, sharing in company profits, company trips, conferences…I could go on and on. I think that my teacher friends think that I am making it all up! I have worked here more than a month and still find out about a cool thing every few days. It should be clear that the leadership wants every team member to love working here. That is the case!

For me, I feel challenged each day in a good way. I feel like people around me care about me and my family. I feel relaxed at the office and at home. I feel like I am contributing to a larger purpose. I have loved my time here. Accepting a position with the Call-Em-All family is one of the best decisions that I have ever made.

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Not wanting these resources to go to waste, I reached out to each coach to get some tips they’ve learned while coaching some of the best athletes at their respective sports, which they’d like to impart on youth coaches. Here is what they had to say.

Quotes from the coaches

Nick Van Exel, Head Coach Texas Legends

“Just be yourself and be honest with what you’re preaching. Believe and speak it with conviction.”

Just be yourself & be honest with what you’re preaching. Believe and speak it with conviction. – Nick Van Exel
Click To Tweet

Lindy Ruff, Head Coach Dallas Stars

“All personalities and all players are different at this level. And I think at a youth level, you’ll be dealing with the same where some kids have tougher personalities and some have sensitive personalities. As a coach, those [the sensitive personalities] are the guys you have to learn to understand and help in different ways.”

As a coach, those [the sensitive personalities] are the guys you have to learn to understand & help in different ways….
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Joe Mikulik, Manager Frisco Roughriders

“You want to teach kids to be mentally tough, and prevent them from transferring blame and be accountable. Be aware of the process, meaning you don’t look for immediate results. If you’re 10-12 years old, obviously those results are not going to be there overnight. We’ve got to make sure we continue to work on fundamentals. Play the game right, play the game correctly and respect the game and your teammates.”

You want to teach kids to be mentally tough, & prevent them from transferring blame & be accountable. – Joe Mikulik
Click To Tweet

Oscar Pareja, Head Coach FC Dallas

“Some points I have seen/learned over the course of this process with professional and academy players, specifically finding ways to impact the player’s/person at the development levels:

• Create good habits for players when they are very young
• Don’t waste time on simulating someone else’s training, every coach is different, every coach has great ways to teach the game.
• Use a good/consistent methodology.
• Create a model of playing that can express what you are as a coach, this is the best way to convince players.
• Planning always is key, but sensing the needs of the players is a great talent to have as a coach.
• I have learned that many can see what is wrong or needs to be fixed, but not many can really find the right way to improve it.

Create good habits for players when they are very young. – Oscar Pareja
Click To Tweet

Do these tips resonate with you or do you have any that you’ve come to live by when coaching youth sports? Let us know if the comments.

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Even we had a use for this new feature! We identified a time-consuming, inefficiency in our accounting process that made it difficult for us to manage and follow-up with outstanding balances: collections calls.

Without hesitation, our Accounting department eagerly put Transfer & Connect to work for collections and billing announcements. Before Transfer & Connect, the Accounting team’s process would take days to complete. Calling all of our account holders, leaving messages when needed, and following up with customers took several days of precious time. Sending calls with Call-Em-All has already saved time and reduced labor costs. The rate of speed the calls are delivered and the simplicity of creating a message makes the use of this feature a no-brainer. Transfer & Connect allows us to not only call every outstanding account with an announcement of the unresolved balance but we also experience a higher success rate in receiving updates on payments.

This new feature takes the normal business practice of notifying customers of outstanding balances to the next level because of the personal interaction that occurs. If a customer wants to discuss the outstanding invoice further or complete the payment immediately, the call is transferred to an available agent on our end. These interactions have allowed us to more quickly update our records and receive prompt payments.

In our experience, if a transferred customer engages with one of our agents, there is a more positive response from customers to receiving a collections call. We understand that emails might be missed or deleted but the phone is always around. Call-Em-All has always been a tool that reaches significantly more contacts with a quick, informative message for customers. It has now developed into a tool that can decrease our agents’ workload and provide customers with peace of mind.

We are very excited to share this tool with our clients and we’re confident that it will be just as helpful in your business. Whether sending appointment reminders, payment reminders, or emergency notices, the ability to capture engaged audiences is invaluable and can be the difference maker in your organization!

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Filter Calls. No Gimmicks

We’re fully on board with Green Lighting ‘Do Not Disturb’ Technology, which means “service providers can offer robocall-blocking technologies to consumers and implement market-based solutions that consumers can use to stop unwanted robocalls.” This enables carriers to block calls that people don’t want, which we completely support. That being said, of course, education must go with this. Carriers have to be made aware of the differences in “bad, spammy” calls and “good” calls, so that they don’t throw away all the “good” automated calls that people actually want to receive. There are companies out there, like NomoRobo, that are working hard to identify good and bad actors in the automated calling industry. We’ll be reaching out to these companies soon and look forward to helping shape how this technology shapes our industry.

Easiest Breakup Ever

Another proposal for the TCPA is Empowering Consumers to Say ‘Stop’. Basically, “consumers have the right to revoke their consent to receive robocalls and robotexts in any reasonable way at any time.”  As a provider, it means enabling opt outs by any reasonable means.  This seems like common sense. If you want off the list of people being broadcasted to, all you have to do is say so. No big deal. We’ve always allowed call recipients to opt out of calls from our clients, and there are several easy ways recipients and clients can inform our system.  Requiring a signature, completion of a paper-based form, or the other things we’ve heard about just complicates that process and we don’t approve of them. We may be biased, but that’s only because we believe automated calls are appropriate in certain situations and should serve the recipients of the messages for the better. In the case of collections calls and texts (which can be harassing in nature), we believe they should only be broadcasted when they serve more as reminders rather than demands.

Hello Freedom, Adios Spammers

Senator Claire McCaskill (MO) along with a dozen other senators wrote a letter to Chairman Tom Wheeler of the FCC that urged him and the commissioners to strengthen the power of the TCPA rather than weakening it. Therefore, Senator McCaskill supported a bill that would protect consumers from spammy, highly illegal robocalls. Domestically, we believe the current regulations are plenty powerful.  However, this bill would make it easier to hunt down and prosecute international spammers who are the source of many illegal robocalls. “Believe it or not, a lot of these calls are coming from computer servers in foreign countries,” McCaskill said during an interview. “If we can give the FTC jurisdiction, which is the enforcement agency, international jurisdiction, then they can work with the FBI internationally.”  Domestic regulations on robocalling aren’t going to stop the truly spammy robocalls because these spammers are typically located internationally and are undeterred by US policies and penalties. This type of law is what we really need to protect consumers, and one we completely support.

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My iPhone, the autodialer

According to the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991), an autodialer or “automatic telephone dialing system” is equipment with the capacity to store or produce numbers through random/sequential number generators; and then make calls to those numbers.  That technology might have been difficult to build when the laws were first written, almost 25 years ago.  In 2015, pretty much any device – even a smartphone – can be used for auto-dialing. This definition is so absurd that FCC commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Ajit Pai address it in their formal statements. Commissioner O’Rielly, stated that, “the FCC has to use a rotary phone as an example of a technology that would not be covered because the modifications needed to make it an autodialer would be too extensive.” Commissioner Pai added, “After this Order, each and every smartphone, tablet, VoIP phone, calling app, texting app—pretty much any phone that’s not a ‘rotary-dial phone’—will be an automatic telephone dialing system.”   

A Phone Call is a Phone Call

Current regulations treat landlines and cell phones differently in the matter of automated calling. We believe that good regulations would treat landlines and cellphones equally, especially when 90 percent of American adults use cell phones and landlines are quickly becoming extinct. A phone call is an interrupting activity because it requires you to address it immediately. Whether that interruption occurs on your cell phone or landline doesn’t matter – it still forces you to give it your attention.  As such, we believe that future policy should simply address automated calling as a whole.

Wrong Number?  Call Your Attorney!

People change numbers or switch services. That’s a fact of life. When that happens, numbers are recycled and reassigned to a new person. This causes problems when the new owner receives calls intended for the previous owner. Under the new regulations, organizations must stop calling a number after it is reassigned and are only given a one call buffer. However, the call recipient is not obligated to actually opt out. Further, what if that one call goes to voicemail? How is an automated calling system supposed to know that the voicemail wasn’t the intended recipient of the call?

We applaud the FCC for mandating that call recipients can opt out by “any reasonable means,” but by not mandating that the unintended recipient actually opt out, the FCC may have opened the floodgates for TCPA plaintiff’s attorneys. There are already plenty of cases where call recipients have intentionally avoided opting out of calls so that they can threaten companies with lawsuits. These aren’t spammers we’re talking about, they are legitimate organizations sending informational messages to a phone number that was reassigned.

The FCC also asserts that a national database of reassigned numbers would allow a company to know which numbers they can call and which they can’t.  This might sound good, but quickly falls apart when you realize that it just doesn’t work.  The organization making the call would have to know if they received that phone number before or after the number was reassigned. Because very few organizations have a list of phone numbers along with the date that the number was collected, this FCC assertion is impractical.

Recommended Reading

If you’d like to learn more about the FCC’s recent rulings (or, if you’re having trouble falling asleep), the links at the top of this page might help.  I particularly recommend the responses from Commissioners O’Rielly and Pai:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-strengthens-consumer-protections-against-unwanted-calls-and-texts

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