TellFi

However, giving out your only cell phone to clients can introduce some new problems, including late night calls, and big issues if a phone is lost or broken

Fortunately, there are virtual phone systems like TellFi made to improve the mobile phone experience for busy professionals like real estate agents. 

Here are a 10 ways TellFi helps real estate agents do more:

1. Turn your voicemails into text. We transcribe your voicemail messages into text email it to you along with the recording. This way, you can read message before listening, and can check it anytime, especially if they’re with a client.

2. One number can reach you whenever you are. Now you can have calls ring your office and cell at the same time, or even send calls to directly to voicemail.

3. Take control of your calls. Send calls to different numbers or voicemails based on time and day. You can give out your TellFi number like it’s your cell, but now you have a layer of control when or where your phones ring.

4. Incredibly easy to use & setup. Why bother with a complex phone system? TellFi can be setup in just 2 minutes and has all the powerful features of an expensive system.

5. Track your leads, automatically.  Get multiple numbers and give one to each major lead source, so you know what lead is generating what calls – all through our easy-to-use interface.

6. Great for high volume listings. If you have a lot of properties, or use high-volume listings like Craigslist or Postlets.com, you can and read through the voicemail messages left rather than being bombarded with calls at all hours.

7. Sound big with a toll-free number. Toll-free numbers are available for no extra cost, but add a big agency sound. 

8. Local numbers available in nearly all North American area codes. Give your office or listings an area code that's local to your clients. Choose from tens of thousands of available numbers.

9. Canadian? TellFi works for you. Finally there’s a virtual phone system that works in Canada, with local numbers in most cities and all provinces.

10. Great for individual agents, or an entire office. Both individual and company plans are available. It’s perfect for collaborating with other agents, or if you decide to go on vacation you can easily send your calls to others.

Plans start at $10 a month.  Learn more about TellFi - See plans and pricing information. 

Today we're happy to announce the launch of TellFi.com -- the easiest way to set up a business phone system.  

TechCrunch wrote up a piece on our launch. Here is an excerpt:

Says Corwin,

“One of the ways we differentiated ourselves was that the other [enterprise] products were bulky to use … And Google Voice [doesn't] really have a lot of the business class features.  Connection quality is really important to people, as is lack of support. People looking for robust business class features as they dug into it found that TellFi was a better alternative.”

TellFi prides itself in having better call quality and fewer dropped calls than competitors and robust analytics like call logs across all plans, useful for companies who want to track things like whether sales people actually made the sales calls they claimed to. And because it’s not VOIP, users do not need to be connected to the Internet to receive calls.

AllThingsD ran the following quote as part of their article:

TellFi co-founder Conor Lee pitched NetworkEffect, “Just like individuals, small businesses are ditching landlines too. They have an expectation and need for professional-sounding phone systems.” And meanwhile, traditionally complex and regulated telephony systems are becoming more like cloud services, making them ripe for start-up-style innovation. Lee added, “Telephony is searching for a future where it’s not dumb pipes.”

Right now, the TellFi team is putting the final touches on our brand new interface.  It's going to be a game-changer.  

We allow anyone to set up their own professional phone system online in just a few minutes.  No complicated interfaces, no need to wait on hold for 45 minutes with tech support, and no more expensive hardware to buy. 

We are very excited to publicly release the first screen shots of the TellFi interface -- hope you like it.

Click on image to view full-size

Click on image to view full-size

Click on image to view full-size

We upset a few major polling firms by accurately predicting the first choice results of the contentious Oakland mayor’s race within a few points.  TellFi’s poll beat out leading polls sponsored by KPIX-TV, national pollster SurveyUSA, and the Oakland Chamber of Commerce – returning results much closer to the final results than the others.

For accurate polling, large sample sizes are usually better.  Other pollsters are forced to rely on smaller sample sizes due to high costs.

Our technology allows us to do polls for much less than others charge, and return three times the number of responses.  It’s pretty hard to argue with these numbers -- check them out:

POLL RESULTS AND COMPARISON – FIRST CHOICE VOTES

PRICING AND SERVICES COMPARISON

Contact us at conor@tellfi.com if you would like to hear more. 

 After four rounds of calculations, our in-depth analysis of the ranked choice polls project Don Perata as the outright winner. However, our numbers suggest that the final ranked choice outcome will end up being much closer than the first choice votes suggested. 

PROJECTED FINAL RESULTS:

Don Perata - 44.4%

Jean Quan - 40.5%

RANKED CHOICE CALCULATIONS AND BREAKDOWN

Email us at conor@tellfi.com to get a spreadsheet with all the data.

As promised in Part 1 of this post, we will be showing details of the poll by zipcode and maps comparing votes for each candidate.  

VOTE COMPARISON 

Here are the visualizations of each candidate's votes.

(download)

Click here to download:

oakland-mayor-race-poll-results-part-2-cxJjjgHolxrAseaCGtea.zip (808 KB)

Here are the results of first choice only, listed by zipcode. 

At TellFi, we like the saying, "go big, or go home."  So, for our inaugural blog post, we are announcing the results of a city-wide poll we conducted recently on the Oakland Mayoral race. 

THE DETAILS
Between Sept 9-15th, we conducted automated phone polls of approximately 30,800 Oakland registered voters in Spanish and in English. Of the voters polled, we received 1,435 completed answers. For easy comparison, language of the poll was purposely very similar to other recent automated surveys conducted on the Oakland Mayor's race.

The poll itself was ranked choice, like the actual election, in which voters are instructed to select a first, second and third-place candidate. No repeat selections are allowed.  This type of poll is also called an "instant run-off" because if no single candidate achieved a majority (more than 50%), then the winner is decided by the second place choices. 

THE TECHNOLOGY
We built this customized polling application in a few days using only the TellFi platform to record messages, design, send and record the results in real-time.  Once the votes were collected, we tallied and used Google Maps and Fusion Tables to create a number of interactive maps and visualizations, one of which is included in this post.

As our first poll, this was a bit of an experiment, but ended up turning out well. In the future, we hope to run California-wide polls and perhaps combine it with some public data for even better visualizations.  Census information, GSS-like social data, and real estate indexes are all on the list.

Of course, TellFi, which is a very powerful voice and SMS platform can be used for many other applications, including all types of polling, subscriber targeting, GOTV efforts, two-way text messaging and more.  Contact us at conor@tellfi.com if you're interested in becoming a beta user.

THE RESULTS

RESULT HEATMAP

The below map shows all the poll results by density in the form of a heatmap. 

COMING UP NEXT
In the next post, we will examine the results in more detail and focus on comparing the candidates from other angles. We can tell you that it will definitely include even more mapping and results indexed by location.