The concept of call-back offering appeared a few years ago and spread across landing pages and selling sites at the speed of a forest fire. A simple idea is that the client does not want to call the seller himself for a number of reasons: psychological discomfort at the beginning of the conversation, fear of calling for private business during working hours, unwillingness to spend money on a call, and so on. The button on the site “Leave your phone number and we will call you back in a minute” solves all these problems: the client receives an incoming call and can quietly go to the meeting room to answer it.

Voximplant has long been firmly established in the market for callback services. In this Habrapost, I’ll tell you about a number of interesting cases that startupers encounter when trying to create their own hundred hundredth callback service with preference and voice recognition. It would seem, what could be easier? A bit of frontend magic, the collection of applications on the backend side, and ... But there are nuances.


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Automatic call

Most sites that have implemented callback services use call centers to handle calls.

Call centers are arranged quite simply: they can either receive incoming calls and continue to communicate using the script, or call customers around and also communicate using the script. Therefore, in order not to integrate the call center and the backend with orders (and this may be ... not so easy), most of the sites implement the following multi-call:

1. The client dials his number on the site and clicks on the “Call me” button.
2. The site contacts the cloud telephony service (for example, our VoxImplant) and sends it the client number.
3. The cloud service makes a call to the call center, waits for the operator to answer, dictates to him which site the client came from (or opens the site card on the operator’s computer, if there is integration).
4. The cloud service makes a call to the client and, when the client answers, commutes it with the operator already waiting “on the wire”, who already knows what to say to the client.

Dynamic widget

Further - more fun. Most companies that want to use a callback service on their websites are completely unwilling to independently develop the corresponding frontend code. Focusing on the needs of such users, service providers offer SaaS solutions that do not require programming. It is enough to add a small piece of code to the site - and the widget associated with the personal account magically materializes on the necessary pages.

But not everything is so simple. Our colleagues from Media 108 after a few months of providing such a service understood how everything is really not easy. Grateful customers, having received a callback widget and increasing the flow of orders, begin to gush with ideas, “how to make it even better”. And of course, so that nothing needs to be programmed. Typical Wishlist spherical client in a vacuum:

• Settings widget for different pages of the site.
• Settings widget depending on where the visitor came to the site.
• Settings of the widget depending on the time of day, the visitor's language and a dozen other parameters.

So after a few months of productive work of a callback service, an ordinary admin panel becomes clouded with tricky visual editors that allow the customer’s employees to fine-tune the widget to fit any client’s request without the help of IT specialists.

Widget integrated into the site

Further - even more fun. Many customers, in principle, do not like the widget, as it violates the “holistic design” of a purchased Wordpress theme or a landing page ordered from a studio. At the same time, they don’t want to write code in the same way as their colleagues who are less prone to perfectionism. Decision? “Widget”, which is really no widget. When you turn on the “integrated” mode in the admin panel, the widget stops drawing a handset on the site and instead integrates into the existing input fields and buttons. The customer creates the necessary interface using his site admin panel, specifies the identifiers of the input fields and the buttons in the Media 108 admin panel. Now click on this button implements the functionality that the widget previously performed, namely, it initiates the callback mechanics. The solution, which was easy to implement at first glance, was polished and debugged for several months, after which it received the beautiful name “SmartCallBack” and started saving customers time and money with terrible force - before, this had to be done by developers.

Settings of the logic of working with call centers

Clients also do not like to integrate something with call centers. But to love their own ideas about communicating with customers - love. Therefore, the entire logic of call forwarding also falls on the shoulders of those who provide callback service: load balancing between call centers, using different call centers depending on time and location of stars, connecting VIP clients with dedicated managers and many other interesting solutions. . The admin panel of a callback service provider that has been working closely in this market for several years is more than impressive.

Callbacks are easy.

And so it turns out that a completely uncomplicated solution (implemented on VoxImplant in a few lines of code) when confronted with reality and business problems begins to grow ... let's call it nuances. And I have told only about interesting things from the point of view of a wide circle of readers. But there are still boring details: billing, reporting, feedback from customers, analytics, integration with CRM, advertising systems and many other business-relevant pieces, without which this same business slowly crawls off to competitors.