A PhoneTree, that is. Do you have the need to get a message out to multiple subscribers? Do you spend countless hours calling customers to remind them that payment is past due? Cancelling all of your appointments for tomorrow? Let the PhoneTree do it for you. In the medical field? check this out.. http://www.phonetree.com/health/roi.htm , It is a no-show ROI calculator. I think it speaks for itself.

I have a customer in the Natural Gas business that I recently installed PhoneTree, and in just the first month they bragged about a reduction of about 6 man hours per week in processing envelopes for cancellations plus their disconnect rate dropped from around 1000 to about 600. The feedback that they receive? “Thank you for calling to remind me that my payment was overdue!”

The way it works is simple; You install a USB or internal peripheral card to interface to your phone lines.

Select your list of contacts that you would like to call, this list can be imported as a text file from most any CRM or billing software capable of exporting to text.

Record your message; you can record or use the built in text to speech engine. You will also need to build a script consisting of “snippets”. These snippets can include “custom” values that you exported in your text file, such as customer name, account number, due date, amont overdue, etc..The text to speech engine will pick up the text from theses custom fields and read them to the called party. Now, determine the calling times; of course you want to check with your local laws to determine what times you are legally allowed to call your customers.

Once you have completed these steps, click the “Start Calls” button and the PhoneTree unit will begin calling. The out of box experience was great…it took around two hours to get the unit installed, the list imported and PhoneTree scripted.

PhoneTree also offers a 30-day, no questions asked, money back guarantee (excluding PhoneTree Pro, Lab, MD), so you really can’t go wrong! Check them out for yourself at http://www.phonetree.com. On their site you can see more real world examples and hear sample messages.

Exchange 2007 does require a lot of resources, and people often ask me why that is. Microsoft really made a very scalable and highly flexible messaging system in Exchange 2007. The ability to handle thousands of mailboxes, unified communications and voice recognition can take a lot of resources.

Making Exchange 2007 64 BIT uses resources efficiently and allows the software to access a lot more memory. Right, Exchange 2007 will eat up a good chunk of memory.

But, don’t let it scare you, some of the functionality in Exchange 2007 as it pertains to voice is awesome. I have a system running in production for a while now and I’ve had a lot of callers ask me what voice system we have. Exchange 2007 handles voice recognition very well. I have yet to have someone say anything bad about voice recognition capability of the system.

What’s more, you can have Exchange read you your mailbox contents. All this takes lot of processing, and when it comes to voice you need to have everything in memory that you need to process (so you need lot of RAM). I say try it, you will be impressed!