Text Messaging Featured Article

A cloud-based voice and text platform  that develops cloud call center products recently announced a free product that allows any business to send out text messages to its customers.

From Ez Texting comes the new product, Free & EZ. It allows businesses to send text messages, for free, to up to 500 recipients each month about emergency alerts, product offers, bill payments, and any other type of information. Ron Burr, CEO of CallFire chatted with TMCnet.com recently about the new offering.

In a statement about the new product he said Ez Texting is working from the same model that helped propel NetZero service into many homes and businesses.

"We are using the same philosophy at Ez Texting as we did when I was with NetZero," Burr said. "[We] provide a great free product and allow customers to upgrade when (and if) their needs require more. NetZero proved the freemium model was a highly efficient channel to reach and service millions of customers, and we're [bringing] that same strategy to Ez Texting."

Once signed up for the product, businesses can use the self-service platform to upload contacts and send out text messages. The system can sync with customer relationship management systems, too, so contacts can be sent directly from one service to another without hassle. Developers within businesses can also take advantage of the Ez Texting RESTful API to create their own marketing products.

Vijesh Mehta, CTO of CallFire, said Free & EZ shows businesses how SMS marketing can really change their operations for the better. Instead of offering a limited set of features, everything is at their disposal, and they are only limited by the number of messages they can send each month.

"What makes Free & Ez so unique is that most freemium products are offered either with a limited feature set to encourage businesses to upgrade or with a time restriction. We wanted to give organizations the opportunity to access all of the great features of our texting product, for an unlimited amount of time, so they can really see how SMS marketing can change their business," Mehta said.

"There is no limitation on the number of contacts that a business can upload and they receive up to 500 text monthly text messages for free," he continued.

The release of Ez Texting comes on the heels of the CallFire release of its own cloud call center platform. The CallFire website indicates that its call center can provide agents with the capabilities of automatic dialing, automatic voicemail messaging, and busy tone handling to streamline calling and speed up business processes. It works on an hourly rate, and therefore, it can scale with businesses as they grow.

Mehta also commented on the nature of the CallFire call center platform and said that the service can shrink or expand to meet the needs of only a handful or up to thousands of agents.

"With our new Cloud Call Center product, it's easier than ever for a business of any size to create and manage custom voice campaigns, whether they have a few virtual agents or thousands," he said.

Call center managers can upload contacts from their CRM systems into their CallFire accounts, and CallFire will automatically begin dialing and handling calls for agents once they sign into the system. Like Ez Texting, it also comes with a full suite of APIs, and now a newly announced PHP software development kit.