No matter where you live, one of today's modern inconveniences are robo calls or unwanted cold calls from marketers, and this is especially true for small business owners in any industry. Ours is no exception, and many T&I professionals run their businesses with a cell phone instead of both a land line phone and a cell phone. Either way is of course fine, but the issue of unwanted phone calls remain, and they are not only annoying but also take away time from actual important work-related tasks. So what can be done to reduce those unwanted calls? Judy tried an app for her Android phone called Hiya and it works really well. Here's her quick review.
- Hiya is actually free and has no ads. You can download it here by entering your cell phone number. Available for Android and iOS.
- Basically Hiya is an additional layer on top of the phone. Say someone calls you who's not in your address book. Your regular phone service will not identify the caller, but Hiya will. It will also add the helpful "spam suspected" warning to the call screen so you won't waste your time picking up the call.
- Some unknown numbers -- we haven't really been able to figure out how Hiya determines which numbers -- will receive a text message thanking them for their call and asking them to identify themselves. In our experience, Hiya is smart enough to only send these messages to actual cell phones, and the caller gets the option to type in their name and their query. Robo callers will not do that, so problem solved. Hiya has sent these automated text messages to actual real new customers, but in our experience, they were not that bothered and simply typed in their name, got cleared by Hiya, and called again.
- Hiya's caller ID is incredibly powerful -- it will identify pretty much any caller. That's how Judy found out that CNN was calling her for an interview a few weeks ago (more on that in a future post).
- You can look at your missed calls on your regular phone interface, but going to the Hiya interface identifies the caller quickly, so you can see, at one glance, if you missed a call from a potential or current client you might not have saved in your contacts. You can then prioritize those phone calls, for instance if you see that you missed a phone call from law firm XYZ.
- In summary: I've been using Hiya for a few months and it's blocked at least 5-10 spam calls every day, which makes my work life more enjoyable and I actually enjoy answering the phone now because I have not taken one single robo call since I've had Hiya. It's definitely one of my favorite apps right now.
We hope you find this post helpful, dear colleagues! If you have found a similar solution that also works great, please do share it with the community.
3 comments:
I've had the same experience with automated calls. I just read the CNN post and I was SO impressed by this app that I'm downloading it right now! Thank you Judy!
@Anabella: Our pleasure! Hope you find it as useful as we did. Finally, peace of mind from annoying phone calls -- pretty amazing!
That app is something I really need. I am constantly answering the phone in case it is a client and it's a telemarketer. Thanks for the tip!
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