Overview

Today, many people order products online and have them delivered. Many retail businesses provide consumers with updates on the estimated time of arrival (ETA) for their orders. You can use the Plivo Python SDK and the Flask framework to create an order, recognize when the order status changes, and send users an SMS notification with the latest ETA. We’ve created some demo code you can use as a template or to see how to incorporate these tasks into your own applications.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. To send messages to the United States and Canada, you must have a Plivo phone number that supports SMS; you can rent numbers from the Numbers page of the Plivo console or by using the Numbers API. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Python development environment.

How does it work?

Our code examples cover three steps of the order and delivery process.

• A user places an order from a web application on their desktop or a mobile app. The order application reports an initial ETA to the consumer.
• The retailer processes the order and updates its system when the ordered item is handed off to a delivery service.
• When the order is delivered, the service updates the delivery status again.

In the first two steps of the process, the program must calculate an updated ETA to communicate with the consumer.

For purposes of this demo we’ve put all three functions into one program, but in the real world they might be in three different applications.

Set up the demo application locally

• Clone the demo application repository from GitHub.

git clone https://github.com/plivo/ETA-notifications-flask.git

• Change your working directory to 2fa-python-demo.

cd ETA-notification-flask

• Install the dependencies using the requirements.txt file.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Edit .env. Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholder with an actual phone number in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234).

A review of the code

Let’s walk through what the code does.

First, a user enters their name and phone number in an order form. (In a real application, information about the item being ordered, the delivery location, and other information would also be included.) This code adds the order to a database. This application doesn’t send any SMS message.

@app.route('/add/orders', methods=['POST'])
def add_orders():
    customer_name = request.form.get('name')
    phone_number = request.form.get('phone_number')
    order = Order(customer_name=customer_name,
                  customer_phone_number=phone_number)
    db.session.add(order)
    db.session.commit()
    return redirect(url_for('order_index'))

Later, someone at the company updates the order status, either by making a change through a user interface, as we show here, or via an automatic update from other software, such as a shipping application. Code on the back end calculates an updated ETA, and this code then sends an SMS message to the customer with the new time.

@app.route('/order/<order_id>/pickup', methods=['POST'])
def order_pickup(order_id):
    order = Order.query.get(order_id)
    order.status = 'Shipped'
    order.notification_status = 'queued'
    db.session.commit()

    callback_url = request.base_url.replace('/pickup', '') + '/notification/status/update'
    send_sms_notification(order.customer_phone_number,
                          'Your package is on its way —
                           ETA ' + now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S"),
                          callback_url)

    return redirect(url_for('order_show', order_id=order_id))

Similar code handles notification of package delivery.

@app.route('/order/<order_id>/deliver', methods=['POST'])
def order_deliver(order_id):
    order = Order.query.get(order_id)
    order.status = 'Delivered'
    order.notification_status = 'queued'
    db.session.commit()

    callback_url = request.base_url.replace('/deliver', '') + '/notification/status/update'
    send_sms_notification(order.customer_phone_number,
                          'Your package was delivered '+ now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S"), callback_url)

    return redirect(url_for('order_index'))

Along with the order status, the status of the sent message is also updated, which is referred to via the callback url in this code.

Test

Save your code and run it.

flask run

Set up ngrok to expose your local server to the internet.

You should be able to see the application in action at https://.ngrok.io/.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can send messages and make calls only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes minutes. Sign up today.

15 Survey Questions to Measure Customer Satisfaction

With the incredible number of products for consumers to choose from, creating customer satisfaction and customer loyalty has never been more important for B2C businesses.

One of the best ways to measure how your customers are feeling is through the use of a customer satisfaction survey, or CSAT survey for short.

What is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

As the name implies, a customer satisfaction survey (or CSAT survey for short) is an invaluable way for businesses to measure how satisfied their users are with the products or services that have been provided, while gaining insights into any points of friction that said users may experience.

These surveys are an essential piece of the puzzle when it comes to remaining relevant and competitive in a world where the customer is king.

Importance of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Did you know that the acquisition cost of new customers is nearly 5 times more expensive than the cost of retaining an existing customer? Or that 1 in 3 customers will leave a business they love after a single bad experience? Gathering and understanding customer feedback is an essential ingredient when it comes to growing your business and building a loyal customer base.

Customer satisfaction surveys allow businesses to do exactly that—by understanding the hurdles that your customers have faced when it comes to your product or service, you are able to reduce friction and create repeat customers.

Different Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys can be broken up into four main categories: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Product-Market Fit (PMF), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Let’s take a moment to review each of these different types of surveys, and when your organization might want to utilize them.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys provide a scaled measurement of a customer’s satisfaction and/or experience with your team or product.

You should utilize CSAT surveys at different touchpoints in your customer’s journey with your business, such as after a purchase or a support request’s completion, to understand their overall satisfaction with their experience.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS surveys ask customers to provide answers to questions on a scale of 0-10 to determine a refined customer loyalty score on a scale of -100 to 100.

This is achieved by evaluating numerical responses tied to customer satisfaction and categorizing them into three groups:

• Detractors (0-6)
• Passive (7-8)
• Promoter (9-10)

From here, simply add the submitted scores to the following formula to find your NPS score:

(% of Promoter scores) – (% of Detractor scores) = Overall NPS score

This type of survey is best utilized by mature products and teams looking to collect specific feedback that can be incorporated into product or service changes intended to enhance the overall customer experience.

Product-Market Fit (PMF)

A PMF survey is a customer satisfaction survey that provides an indication of whether or not your product has achieved product-market fit or not by asking users how they would feel if they could no longer use your product on a scale of “not disappointed” to “very disappointed”.

This type of survey is commonly used by newer products that are not yet far enough along to utilize an NPS survey.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

This type of survey measures the perceived effort required from the user to accomplish an action with regards to your product or service.

You will commonly find this type of survey used to gain an understanding of how your company might reduce customer friction by removing obstacles they have experienced when utilizing your product or service.

Best Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

Now that we’ve covered some of the different types of customer satisfaction surveys you might use, let’s talk about some of the best CSAT survey questions you might include when seeking feedback from your users, broken down by category.

Customer satisfaction questions specific to agents

The questions covered in this category can be used to measure how satisfied your customers are with the assistance they have received from your customer support team.

1. Were we able to resolve your questions or concerns with our product?
2. Were we able to resolve your questions or concerns in a timely manner?
3. How much effort were you required to put into finding a resolution for your problem?
4. How did we compare to your expectations?
5. How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns?

The responses you receive to these CSAT survey questions will allow your support team to improve upon future customer interactions.

Customer satisfaction questions specific to service channels

The CSAT survey questions included here can be used to measure how well you accommodate users requesting support via a specific service channel.

1. What is your preferred channel to receive customer support through?
2. Was this your first time receiving support via [service channel]?
3. How intuitive was your service experience through [service channel]?
4. What other channels have you enjoyed receiving support through?
5. What could we have done differently to enhance your customer experience on this channel?

By evaluating the responses you receive for the above customer satisfaction survey questions, you can determine which service channels your customers most prefer and allocate additional time, training, agents, and resources towards them.

Customer satisfaction questions specific to the product or service

The below survey questions can be used to evaluate your customer’s satisfaction with your product or service.

1. How satisfied are you with our product / service?
2. How likely are you to recommend our product / service to a friend or colleague?
3. How well does our product meet your needs?
4. If you could recommend one improvement to our product / service, what would it be?
5. How would you rate the value versus price of our product?

By evaluating the responses your customers leave about your product or service, you can evaluate which features your users care most about to gain valuable insight into your target audience’s preferences.

Best Practices: Keeping in mind the objective and length of the survey

When creating a customer satisfaction survey to share with your users, it’s important to keep in mind both the specific objective of the survey and the length of the survey.

Most people don’t enjoy filling out surveys. People do, however, respond well when they know that their contribution can make a difference. By having a clearly defined objective in mind when creating your CSAT survey, you can decide which questions are most important to ask, exclude unnecessary filler, and encourage user participation all while respecting your customer’s time.

How PlivoCX helps teams to enhance customer service

PlivoCX is cloud contact center software for B2C teams built with customer and agent satisfaction in mind. With Contacto, agent teams are supported by helpful automations, a unified desktop, and an omnichannel experience to exceed consumer needs and create happy customers and agents alike.

If you’re looking to keep up with the demands of the new era of support operations, we’re here to help.

Book a demo with our sales team, and we’ll help you find the right solution for your team’s needs.

Despite the fact that everyone nowadays carries a personal cellphone, business phones aren’t going away — but they are changing. Like many services, business telephony is moving to the cloud, thanks to technology like SIP trunking, which offers businesses advantages such as quick provisioning, low costs, and no equipment to procure or maintain.

It’s a big change from the way business telephony used to run. In the good old days before the internet was everywhere — say, 1990 — telephone calls ran over copper wires from customer premises to analog switches in carrier central offices. If you ran a business and wanted to give your employees individual phones, you installed equipment called a private branch exchange (PBX). The phone company would run a line from their network to a punchdown block in a wiring closet at your location, and your technical team would run internal wiring to employees’ cubicles and drop fancy phones on top of their desks. Together the phones and the PBX supported advanced features like call hold and call forwarding. At least they were advanced compared to what people could do with their home phones.

The World Wide Web was invented in 1993, and within a few years it was clear that the internet was going to be a global network that could connect everyone and everything — including phones. Voice and video traffic could cross the network by using networking protocols like Internet Protocol (IP). The advent of voice over IP (VoIP) led to the development of the IP PBX, a hardware box (either a purpose-built device or a general-purpose server running software such as Asterisk, the first open source IP PBX) that translated between circuit-switching telephone calls and packet-switching networks.

What is SIP trunking?

Let’s start with the first part of this phrase: SIP. 

For network devices to communicate, they have to agree on common data and transmission formats, or protocols. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) was developed to provide a common way for devices and applications to initiate, maintain, and terminate real-time multimedia sessions involving voice and video. Simply put, SIP enables communication over the internet. It sets up, modifies, and terminates communication sessions.   

The second part of the phrase, trunking, refers to the consolidation of multiple communication channels into a single, logical connection. Historically, a trunk line is the cable that brings phone service to a building. Today, trunks are virtual, running over the same network as a company’s data. 

SIP trunking is a modern, cost-effective, and flexible way to handle business communications. It's a key component of many VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems.

6 benefits of SIP trunking

SIP trunking delivers a range of business benefits. Here are just a few to keep in mind as you explore this solution for your company.

Flexibility

With SIP trunking, businesses can add numbers easily whenever they need them, and each number can make and receive unlimited local and long-distance calls. Compared to traditional Primary Rate Interface (PRI) solutions, which use 23 voice channels, SIP trunking can use just one channel. As a result, you will only pay for what you use, and can increase or decrease your bandwidth easily with SIP.

Scalability

You can add as many numbers as you need and drop them when the need goes away. Businesses that need to scale to meet seasonal demand or that plan to scale their infrastructure as they grow can benefit from not having to invest in new hardware or software.

Mobility

Employees can make or receive calls from wherever they work, whether in-office, remotely, or a hybrid of the two. An SIP endpoint can move to almost any device, so employees can be reached in the office or working from a coffee shop.

Manageability

No more waiting on hold to reach a representative. SIP trunking and VoIP phones typically offer self-service options and on-site support, with instructions to help adjust call routing, change extensions, or add new lines. Ultimately, managing SIP trunks is much easier and less time-consuming.

Cost savings

SIP trunking is cost-effective, especially with Plivo. Businesses pay a small monthly fee and less than a penny a minute (in the US; pricing varies by country) for outgoing voice calls. That’s less than the cost of a call on a number leased from a phone company. 

SIP trunking offers another cost advantage—no hardware is necessary. Any network device with a microphone and speakers can act as a softphone. That saves companies the cost of procuring and maintaining telephones, though if you prefer to have a separate device for phone calls, you can buy SIP handsets.

Virtual local presence

You can use SIP phone numbers with any area code and exchange that your provider offers. You can appear to be a local caller to your customers, boosting trust and increasing familiarity with your brand. Even if you’re far away, it’s possible to connect through a virtual local presence. 

SIP advantages go beyond the ones on this list. You can create SIP endpoints that let you invoke custom functionality when you make or receive calls. Any Plivo application can implement the logic needed to control a registered SIP phone. Read our documentation to get a feel for how that works.

Drawbacks to SIP trunking

Ready to jump into SIP trunking with both feet? Just be aware of a couple of potential drawbacks.

With SIP trunking, if your network goes down, so does your phone system. You can use an old-school PRI (Primary Rate Interface) as a backup option, but weigh the costs and benefits. If your network is 99.9% stable during business hours, you might not want to pay for phone lines you never use. 

Another disadvantage is that SIP traffic is network traffic, and if your network is already congested, you may worsen your problems. However, bandwidth is cheap nowadays, so you can solve that problem by simply increasing your bandwidth at an affordable rate.

Use cases: SIP trunking in different industries

SIP trunking is used by financial institutions, healthcare providers, retailers and other businesses to facilitate communication and stick to a budget. Here’s a few use cases to demonstrate how real-world businesses utilize SIP trunking.

Retail

Retailers use SIP trunking to support omnichannel customer experiences. By enabling seamless communication across different channels, retailers can improve customer service and boost customer satisfaction through improved call handling, efficient order processing, and streamlined support interactions. Likewise, features like call routing, voicemail-to-email, and CRM integration contribute to increased productivity and sales.

Healthcare

SIP trunking allows healthcare providers to offer better patient care. Medical staff can communicate seamlessly to share medical records, schedule appointments, and host remote consultations. Healthcare organizations can consolidate voice and data services to reduce expenses, directing more resources toward patient outcomes. Plus, features like unified communications empower medical professionals to collaborate effectively, improving overall productivity.

Financial institutions

Banks, lenders, and other financial institutions can use SIP trunking to deliver secure, reliable communication. Financial firms can achieve substantial cost savings by eliminating the need for multiple phone lines and associated hardware. Furthermore, unified communication tools enhance team collaboration, accelerate decision-making, and improve overall efficiency.

Get Plivo’s solution for SIP trunking

Zentrunk, Plivo’s SIP trunking service, is a popular option for businesses of all sizes. Zentrunk ’s cloud-based, so acquiring or managing any hardware on-prem is unnecessary. Zentrunk offers guaranteed call quality, high uptime, and unlimited concurrent calls. You can purchase and instantly provision SIP numbers for inbound calls in dozens of countries on every continent (except Antarctica), and make calls from your SIP numbers to virtually everywhere on Earth.

Ready to try Zentrunk? Dive into our Quickstart guide, sign up for a Plivo account, and start connecting with the world.

Zapier, an online automation tool that connects applications, lets you integrate Plivo with other applications to send SMS text messages after a specified event. Until recently Plivo could only send SMS messages through Zapier, but we’ve added MMS functionality, so you can now trigger messages that send audio, image, or video along with some text.

Let’s see how to use Plivo with Zapier integration to send MMS messages. For our example we’ll send an MMS message upon successful registration for an event in a Google Form.

Step 1: Create a Google Form

Create a Google Form that lets people register for an event. The form can have several fields — name, email address, phone number, and company name. Also specify the name of a Google Sheet to hold the information that’s captured when someone submits the form.

Step 2: Specify a trigger

Open Zapier and click Create Zap. Specify Google Forms as the trigger application. Choose “New Response in Spreadsheet” as the trigger event, then click Continue.

If you haven’t done so already, connect your Google account with Zapier, then specify the spreadsheet and worksheet that holds your form information. Click Continue, then test the trigger.

Step 3: Specify an action

Once you’ve successfully specified the trigger, Zapier takes you back to the Zap setup screen, where you can specify the action to take when the trigger fires. Click on or specify Plivo, then choose Send MMS as the event and click Continue. If you haven’t done so already, connect your Plivo account with Zapier by copying your Auth ID and Auth Token from the console and pasting them into the authentication popup. Click Continue.

Next, set up the action by specifying values for source and destination numbers, the text to be sent in the message, and URLs for the media you want to send. The source or from number must be a US or Canada number, because the Plivo SMS API supports sending MMS messages only from those countries. Choose an MMS-enabled number from the numbers you have registered on the console. Fetch the destination number from the Phone Number field of your Google Form, or rather that column in the Google Sheet that holds the data. Finally, click Continue.

Ta-da!🎉 You’ve created a Zap to send an MMS message whenever someone registers through your form. Test it out to make sure it works the way you want it to.

You can use a similar process to send MMS messages for other events, such as birthday reminders, employee anniversaries, successful sales deals, and product debuts. You can also set triggers from any application Zapier integration supports, such as Google Calendar, an email marketing application, or a social media platform.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes minutes. Sign up today.

Businesses are so often focused on satisfying the customer that they chip away agent satisfaction in the process. It’s no secret that customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are very much connected, but what does this actually mean?

Glassdoor’s 2020 Economic Research report revealed that companies with highly satisfied employees are more likely to have high customer satisfaction scores, a stat that holds especially true in industries with higher levels of customer contact.

Taking the necessary steps to improve your contact center agents’ satisfaction levels within your company will increase their loyalty to the team, leading to more dedicated and successful agents and customers.

What is agent satisfaction?

Agent satisfaction is the measure of how satisfied or dissatisfied employees in an organization are. Businesses that actively measure employee job satisfaction are able to track employee motivation, productivity, and loyalty to their organization.

So why is agent satisfaction so important to understand, and what does this mean for modern B2C teams?

Importance of agent satisfaction in modern business

It’s often said that the customer is king, and rightfully so—prioritizing the needs of your customers is a surefire strategy to increase revenue. Which is exactly why agent satisfaction is important.

Agents that are not satisfied with their employer contribute to high agent absenteeism and turnover, and are unlikely to provide the same quality support to customers that a satisfied agent would.

Businesses that emphasize agent satisfaction by prioritizing the needs of their employees can drive positive improvements in customer satisfaction, while reducing agent turnover and agent absenteeism.

Taking into consideration the correlation between customer satisfaction and contact center agent job satisfaction, you can begin to see why agent satisfaction is important and how it can grow revenue for your business.

How to measure agent satisfaction

There are several ways to measure your team’s happiness in their work, but the easiest method is to use the Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI). This index is determined by assigning a numerical value (1-10) to three simple survey questions:

• How satisfied are you with your current workplace?
• How well does your current workplace meet your expectations?
• How close is your current workplace to the ideal?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can calculate your ESI with the following formula:

• ESI= [((question mean value ÷ 3) – 1) ÷9]*100

The higher the number, the more satisfied your agents are in the workplace.

Surveying employees allows you to understand how your agents really feel about their job, and gives you the opportunity to meet them where they are.

Agent satisfaction isn’t a static metric, and is sure to change over time—it’s important that your organization keeps a consistent pulse on employee engagement and takes active measures to improve upon this engagement, as this will inevitably grow revenue.

Impact of agent satisfaction on revenue and profitability

Let’s take a look at a few statistics showing the impact of agent satisfaction on revenue, and how highly-satisfied agents can contribute to your business’ profitability:

• A happy agent is a dedicated agent—business units made up of highly engaged employees are more present and provide a better experience to the customer. 94% of consumers who have a good support experience are “very likely” to repurchase from a company.
• As we mentioned earlier, happy agents make for happy customers, and increasing customer retention rates by 5% canincrease profitability by up to 95%.
• Prioritizing your contact center employee’s job satisfaction will reduce agent absenteeism and agent turnover. In 2020, the cost of replacing an agent (screening, recruiting, interviewing, and training) exceeded $12,000.
• In 2019, Harvard Business Review calculated that a one-star improvement in Glassdoor employer ratings yielded anywhere between a 7-18% increase in long-term market valuation.

How to improve agent satisfaction

With the understanding of why agent satisfaction is important and how happier agents result in increased revenue, we next need to look at how your business can measure and improve upon your agent’s satisfaction.

Here we’ve outlined a few of the methods you can use to measure and improve your contact center team’s happiness:

• A place to hang your hat (Agent retention)
• Making an agent feel welcome isn’t something that should only be reserved for their first day on the job. Creating a continuous program to build a team that feels like a family will build agent loyalty and increase agent retention.
• How can we help you? (Agent surveys)
• Surveys aren’t only meant for customers! Surveying your agents on an annual or semi-annual basis can build an open and recurring feedback loop with management and identify friction points before they become a problem.
• Walk before you run (Comprehensive training)
• Another key driver in keeping contact center agents satisfied is the number of training and coaching hours that they receive. Equip your agents with all of the necessary tools to excel, and you’ll see a marked improvement in morale.
• Reap the rewards of great service (Reward your agents for excellent performance)
• Communicating with customers isn’t always easy—be sure to reward your agents that go above and beyond in customer communications with prizes, an extra vacation day, promotions, or some other incentive for a job well done.
• Make yourself at home (Let your agents work from home)
• Many working professionals have grown accustomed to working from home since COVID-19 reshaped the way businesses operated back in 2020, and contact center agents are no exception. A Pipkins research report showed that agents who work from home have a retention rate that is 55% higher than those working from an office.

Improve agent satisfaction and increase revenue with PlivoCX

PlivoCX is cloud contact center software for B2C teams built with agent satisfaction in mind. With Contacto, agent teams are supported by helpful automations, a unified desktop, and an omnichannel experience to exceed consumer needs and create happy customers and agents alike.

If you’re looking to keep up with the demands of the new era of support operations, we’re here to help.

Book a demo with our sales team, and we’ll help you find the right solution for your team’s needs.

Plivo has a lot of great capabilities built into its cloud communications platform. If you’re a Go developer, this post is for you: Learn how easy it is to send and receive SMS text messages and make and receive voice calls with Go, the Plivo Go SDK, and Plivo APIs.

How to send and receive SMS messages

If you’re interested in messaging applications, Plivo’s cloud communications platform makes things easy for you. Sending an SMS message requires just 15 lines of code; receiving messages takes just 17, or you can create a Go application to receive and respond to SMS messages.

How to send and receive SMS messages

Sending MMS messages is equally simple, and we’ve written a guide to receiving and responding to MMS messages with Go.

How to get set up and make and receive phone calls

Start by reading how to make a phone call from a Go application using Plivo’s Voice API. That post covers how to install Plivo’s Go SDK, which makes it easier to build applications that use Plivo. The SDK provides objects, functions, and methods to handle common tasks associated with building voice and messaging applications.

Once you have that in place, you can use PHLO, Plivo’s visual workflow design studio, to set up the workflow of the call, then trigger the PHLO with a few lines of Go code.

Once you know how to use Go with Plivo to make and receive calls, you can move into specific use cases, such as call forwarding and interactive voice response systems.

More resources

From there, the sky’s the limit. We support you all the way with our Go SDK, Quickstart guide, and more than a dozen use case guides, and if those aren’t enough, you can contact our support team for white glove support.

A journey of a thousand miles Plivo use cases begins with a single step: sign up for a free trial account today.

Plivo has a lot of great capabilities built into its cloud communications platform. If you’re a Java developer, this post is for you: Learn how easy it is to send and receive SMS text messages and make and receive voice calls with Java, the Plivo Java SDK, and Plivo APIs.

How to send and receive SMS messages

If you’re interested in messaging applications, Plivo’s cloud communications platform makes things easy for you. Sending an SMS message requires just 18 lines of code; receiving messages takes just 17, or you can create a Java application to receive and respond to SMS messages.

How to send and receive MMS messages

Sending MMS messages is equally simple, and we’ve written a guide to receiving and responding to MMS messages with Java.

How to get set up and make and receive phone calls

Start by reading how to make a phone call from a Java application using Plivo’s Voice API. That post covers how to install Plivo’s Java SDK, which makes it easier to build applications that use Plivo. The SDK provides objects, functions, and methods to handle common tasks associated with building voice and messaging applications.

Once you have that in place, you can use PHLO, Plivo’s visual workflow design studio, to set up the workflow of the call, then trigger the PHLO with a few lines of Java code.

Once you know how to use Java with Plivo to make and receive calls, you can move into specific use cases, such as call forwarding and interactive voice response systems.

More resources

From there, the sky’s the limit. We support you all the way with our Java SDK, Quickstart guides (which include help for developers who use the Spring and Spark frameworks), and more than a dozen use case guides, and if those aren’t enough, you can contact our support team for white glove support.

A journey of a thousand miles Plivo use cases begins with a single step: sign up for a free trial account today.

Consumers like to know who’s calling them before they decide whether to answer a ringing phone. Calls from unfamiliar sources could be time-wasters — the verbal equivalent of spam email. Carriers help customers identify callers by providing caller ID, a published standard for identifying call origins.

Originating carriers include caller ID information when calls are initiated. It’s up to receiving carriers to associate a caller ID with a caller ID name, or CNAM. In the US, carriers can do this by querying a line information database (LIDB) — a public repository that associates phone numbers with names.

Plivo makes CNAM mapping easy

Plivo lets you specify a CNAM record for any and all of your phone numbers and publishes it for you to the LIDB, so all carriers can report your company name along with caller ID number information.

To map a CNAM for your organization to one or all of your Plivo phone numbers, go to the Phone Numbers page of the Plivo console. Tick the phone numbers you’re interested in providing a name for, then click on the Choose Action dropdown and choose Add CNAM. Enter a name (up to 15 characters) and click Submit CNAM. The numbers’ CNAM status on the console will change to “In Progress” while we submit the information to an LIDB. Within a short time the numbers’ status will change to show whether your submission was a success, partial success, or a failure.

Plivo makes the CNAM mapping process as quick and easy as possible; the less time you spend mapping, the more time you can spend bringing value to your customers.

Credibility through CNAM

Call recipients are more likely to answer a name they recognize. The CNAM you provide should fairly represent your organization and give credibility to the call. You can use your business or brand name, but CNAM can be no more than 15 characters long, including spaces, and special characters are not supported.

CNAM builds trust with the carriers as well. When you register your name you make sure it’s accurate, and carriers will be less likely to filter your calls as spam.

CNAM isn’t the only tool available for making sure people know who’s calling them. Within the last year the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has directed US carriers to implement STIR/SHAKEN, a framework that represents how confident a service provider is in that the number’s owner is truly the one placing the call. That means call recipients should receive caller IDs along with the word “verified” directly below it when calls from the numbers they purport to be. Unverified calls might have their caller IDs spoofed, meaning the caller is pretending to be someone they aren’t, usually for no good purpose.

Between CNAM registration and STIR/SHAKEN attestation, your call recipients can be confident that calls from your organization are really from you, and should be more willing to engage with your business.

Don’t wait

Head over to the console and start mapping your CNAM to your numbers now.

Plivo has a lot of great capabilities built into its cloud communications platform. If you’re a PHP developer, this post is for you: Learn how easy it is to send and receive SMS text messages and make and receive voice calls with PHP, the Plivo PHP SDK, and Plivo APIs.

How to send and receive SMS messages

If you’re interested in messaging applications, Plivo’s cloud communications platform makes things easy for you. Sending an SMS message requires just 10 lines of code; receiving messages takes only nine.

How to send and receive MMS messages

Sending MMS messages is equally simple, and we’ve written a guide to receiving and responding to MMS messages with PHP.

How to get set up and make and receive phone calls

Start by reading how to make a phone call from a PHP application using Plivo’s Voice API. That post covers how to install Plivo’s PHP SDK, which makes it easier to build applications that use Plivo. The SDK provides objects, functions, and methods to handle common tasks associated with building voice and messaging applications.

Once you have that in place, you can use PHLO, Plivo’s visual workflow design studio, to set up the workflow of the call, then trigger the PHLO with a few lines of PHP code.

Once you know how to use PHP with Plivo to make and receive calls, you can move into specific use cases, such as call forwarding and interactive voice response systems.

More resources

From there, the sky’s the limit. We support you all the way with our PHP SDK, Quickstart guide (and one for Laravel), and more than a dozen use case guides, and if those aren’t enough, you can contact our support team for white glove support.

A journey of a thousand miles Plivo use cases begins with a single step: sign up for a free trial account today.