Basic Knowledge: Invoca Phone Numbers — Promo Numbers and Destinations

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Contents of this Article

• General Overview
• Destinations and phone call routing 
• Types of promo numbers and how to provision them 
• Porting phone numbers into or out of your Invoca Account 
• Essential Phone Numbers FAQs 

General Overview

To oversimplify things, Invoca works by connecting your online marketing and business tools to your phone conversations through the clever use of phone numbers. When you use Invoca, you'll notice two different terms that we use to talk about different kinds of phone numbers: destinations and promo numbers. 

• A destination is the phone number where your organization receives phone calls — for example, a call center or line of business. 

Normally, this would be the only phone number you'd need. For example, when you pick up your phone to call your grandmother, you'd be dialing her destination number. But in your business, that simple process leaves a lot of valuable information behind — and that's where promo numbers come in. When a potential customer visits your website or ad, they don't see your destination phone number, they see one of your Invoca promo numbers instead.

• A promo number is a phone number that belongs to your Invoca account that is used for a specific purpose — either shown to a single visitor on your website or used for a single promotion.

Using Invoca, you have a whole lot of promo numbers that all connect back to the same destinations, but Invoca shows each of these promo numbers to different people. Then, based on the promo number that connected your call, you'll get all the information from your caller's digital journey alongside that phone call. 

This article will walk through all the tools at your disposal within Invoca to manage and get the most out of both your destinations and your promo numbers.

Destinations and phone call routing 

In your Invoca account, we set up a lot of things to make sure you don't have to worry too much about your destinations. Your Invoca Tag automatically detects the destination phone numbers on your landing pages, so you don't need to worry about manually swapping those. Likewise, when you build your Invoca call treatment, the "route to detected destination" uses that same detected number and routes the phone call through Invoca, back to the phone number we swapped out in the first place! Without any work on your part, this is good enough for a lot of Invoca use cases. However, you can do a whole lot more, too.

If you have several different destinations that you want to route phone calls to — for example, if you have different call centers for sales and customer support, or yours is a large, multi-location organization — Invoca can help you keep track of them all. Invoca's destination management feature (beta) gives you the tools to set routing and ringpool behavior for each of these different destinations. See our article How to manage your website phone numbers through Destinations for a full guide.

Invoca has even more tools to help you intelligently route phone calls to the right destination, as well. See our guide How to understand, build, and edit a call treatment for your Invoca campaign to learn how to set up a call treatment that can route phone calls based on the caller's time, location, digital journey, in-menu prompts, and more. You can even combine more than one data factor using our advanced routing via lookup tables.

Types of promo numbers, and how to provision them

There are two types of promo numbers in Invoca: dynamic (RingPool), and static.

• Dynamic promo numbers are used on your landing pages and are dynamically inserted in place of your destination by your Invoca Tag. Each dynamic promo number is served to only one visitor on your landing page at a time.
• Static promo numbers are used anywhere you can't dynamically serve a unique promo number for each visitor — including display ads or offline promotions. Everyone who sees that promotion will see the same static promo number.
  
  

Because dynamic promo numbers are served to your visitors one at a time, Invoca associates that promo number with the full digital journey of the person who saw that number. This gives you full, individualized data attribution for what drove your call. Invoca uses a feature called RingPools to cycle through all the promo numbers associated with a single destination or campaign and connect them to your callers. You can learn more about managing the way Invoca serves dynamic promo numbers in our article Creating and managing RingPools™ to serve dynamic promo numbers.

Direct promo numbers aren't managed automatically like dynamic numbers are. Instead, you'll create them in Invoca either manually, by bulk, or via API. Once you've created a new direct promo number, you'll be able to set its routing options and apply the same Marketing Data value for all calls to that promo number. All phone calls received from a direct promo number will have the same Marketing Data values assigned to them.

All inbound phone calls to the Invoca platform will automatically disconnect after a three-hour period. This timeout setting applies to all Invoca accounts, and is not adjustable at this time.

1. To determine why a call was disconnected for your static or dynamic number, open a Calls Report, navigate to the Call Details, and click into the 'Call Info' tab. 
2. In the 'End of Call Reason' field, you’ll see whether the call ended due to the caller hanging up, the agent disconnecting, or if it reached the Invoca maximum call duration.

Note: That phone carriers may also impose shorter time limits, which will be displayed in the 'End of Call Reason' field.

During seasons like AEP or open enrollment periods, when you are anticipating calls that may go beyond 3 hours, connect with your account team to request a temporary update. This update will allow calls to extend up to 8 hours. If you do not have an account team, contact success@invoca.com.

Note: This feature is only available from Oct 1st - December 8th each year.

Porting phone numbers into or out of your Invoca account

Maintaining a large set of phone numbers can be a significant cost, and Invoca is here to help. Invoca is capable of porting phone numbers into your Invoca account. Need those numbers for something else? No worries — you can also port phone numbers you previously owned out of Invoca.

Essential Phone Numbers FAQs

Q1: Why can't I obtain a specific area code in the Invoca portal?

If a specific area code is unavailable, it is likely that our carriers have exhausted the inventory for that area code due to high demand. Consider using an overlay area code for the desired location.

Q2: I'm told you have the inventory, but I'm still not able to get the local number I need.

If you see available numbers in the inventory but cannot select them, try decreasing or increasing the radius preference. This expands the search area and may help in finding available numbers.

Q3: I want a specific number (vanity number).

Currently, we do not support vanity numbers for either local or toll-free lines. If you desire a specific number, you may contact the owning carrier directly to purchase it. Once acquired, we can assist in porting the number into our system. You can also buy from vanity providers like NumberBarn.com and then port them in. 

Q4: How can I get 800 numbers?

Submit a request to your Customer Success Manager (CSM).

Q5: Can I select a specific prefix toll-free number?

Not at this time.

Q6: I'm seeing a higher than expected volume of Pooling Overflow calls, what can I do to lower that?

Your Customer Success Manager can help walk you through auto-scale options with your Ringpools to ensure enough numbers are available to meet your site traffic needs.

 

Q7: What can be done if I accidentally delete an Invoca number?

Depending on the length of time since you’ve deleted the number, we may be able to recover the number and reassign to your account. You can open a support ticket to get the process started.

Maintaining a large set of phone numbers can be a significant cost, and Invoca is here to help.

Related:
• Creating and managing RingPools™ to serve dynamic promo numbers 
• Basic Knowledge: Deploying Invoca on your landing pages 
• Basic Knowledge: Capturing Marketing Data with Invoca