Our modern lives can be hectic, to say the least. Fortunately, we live in a world where technology can help us to remember all the small things we forget. According to a pilot study, published earlier today in the journal BMJ Open, seventeen patients with high blood pressure received daily automated telephone calls for one month. The results of the study indicated that phone calls may help patients to take medicines as prescribed.
But where do you turn to when you need a reminder regarding calls themselves? For many of us that are juggling busy personal and professional lives, staying on top of calls can be stressful. Luckily, there is now a service which can help. Ninja Number is an AI-powered virtual phone service for businesses and entrepreneurs, leverages AI and automation to help businesses improve customer interaction and gather data through better integration of phone services.
To get a better understanding of the company and how it works, we spoke with Jay Reeder, President & CEO at Cirravox, Ninja Number’s parent company.
The name Ninja Number sounds very fun and interesting. Where did this name come from and what was the thought process behind it?
I was driving down the road one day in the fall of 2017, thinking about a marketing pitch for VoiceNation, my live answering company. I came up with: “We’re like the Ninjas of Live Answering”. I laughed to myself because it might be a better description of this new app we were working on that was like an AI personal assistant for telephone leads.
And then it just came to me: Ninja Number. Ninjas were always in the background, working effectively to get the job done with precision and intelligence. Those were the same characteristics that were present in the new phone system. So the new product became Ninja Number.
Can you explain a little bit about how Ninja Number can help businesses improve customer interaction and what the overall service offers?
First of all, Ninja Number is a smartphone app that puts a complete business phone system on your cellphone. We’ve kept the virtual phone system simple and easy to use by leveraging AI and conversational interface to match the device and lifestyle of entrepreneurs. Nobody wants to get a Ph.D in PBX just to answer the phone. Depending on the level of service, Ninja Number will provide business phone numbers for customers, and you can configure the app to meet your needs, whether it’s forwarding calls to your cellphone, going to voicemail or setting up a complex multi-extension auto attendant.
All of that is pretty standard stuff. Where Ninja Number excels is in helping to track and respond to leads. The app uses AI to remind the user if they haven’t responded to leads in a certain time period, and actually grades them on their responsiveness. That’s a pretty central part of what we do to help businesses in an area where they need the most help with – getting back in touch with customers. Studies show that 71% of leads are wasted. That’s a lot of money going down the drain. If you don’t get to them within 5 minutes, someone else will.
We want businesses to continue to improve their responsiveness to customers. We believe that by doing this, businesses can double their sales revenue.
Can you give an example of a company or case study that has really benefited from Ninja Number?
We get kudos from people constantly about how the service follows them around so they don’t have to be tethered to a landline. But perhaps the most honest feedback we got was from an entrepreneur with a home office who told us that having a toll-free number meant his customers could contact him from anywhere, and they wouldn’t know that he was actually working from his home office in his pajamas.
The bottom line is that with Ninja Number, you can answer calls no matter where you are. And that’s important when dealing with new sales.
What was the main motivator to solve this problem, for example, did it arise from a personal experience or something you recognized others having issues with?
We’ve been in the business of SaaS telephone apps for decades and decided to start over and reinvent what we were doing for customers. To do that, we had to lease a new smaller office, spin off a team of developers, and get into a new environment where we could have space to really think about the services the industry was creating. We knew it could be better. This product started by looking at the needs of small businesses and how we could create technology to help automate and solve problems that weren’t being solved.
Who do you consider to be your main competitors and how do you differentiate yourself from them?
There’s a lot more to Ninja Number that will be coming out in the next few months. I’m not sure that anyone is doing the work we’re doing. We differentiate ourselves by continually creating solutions to problems that aren’t crafted by the way everyone else has always done it.
What is the main focus for Ninja Number over the next 6 months?
We’ve been working on this project for over a year and our first goal is to complete the vision we have for version 1.0. After that, we want to continue leveraging AI and other technology to automate and help small businesses better connect with customers.
Disclosure: This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company
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