Following on yesterday's post about pending balances is a relatively new feature within Call-Em-All - the ability to restrict the length of your messages.  This feature can be found by clicking "My Account" then "Broadcast Preferences".  When set, our 866 number will automatically stop recording if you go over the set limit.  There are two reasons why you would want to do this:

1) Recording a message over 30 seconds causes you to use additional call units.  This is particularly handy if you are having a celebrity or someone unfamiliar with Call-Em-All record your message, or if you have more than one user on your account. 

2) If you are setting up several broadcasts at the same time, but want to record the messages later - this will keep your pending balance from becoming too large.

We occasionally field questions about pending balance.  Usually, people are confused because their pending balance is larger than the number of automated calls they intend to make.  This typically happens to people that record long messages, or people that set up multiple phone blast messages at the same time.  Hopefully, this post will offer more clarity on how pending balance works.

'Pending Balance' represents call broadcasts that have been set up, but not yet completed.  Usually, this is a rather simple equation.  For example, if you have 1000 call units in your account and set up a 26-second message to 50 people, you will have a pending balance of 50 and an available balance of 950.  However, there are two scenarios that can cause confusion:

Scenario 1:  Your message is longer than 30 seconds.  If you were to record a 55-second message in the above example, your pending balance would be 100 and your available balance would be 900.  The reason is that a 55-second message requires two calling units for each phone number to call.

Scenario 2:  You haven't yet recorded your message.  When you have set up a broadcast but haven't yet recorded a message, our system will assume you are going to record the longest possible message (usually 3 minutes).  In the scenario above, the pending balance would be 300 call units (6 max units x 50 phone numbers).  As soon as the message is recorded, the pending balance is adjusted accordingly.

 Just let us know if you have any other questions!

- Brad

We’ll use this blog to share anything about our automated calling service that we think you’d find either interesting or useful.  We’ll share client success stories, hints and tips for our website, creative uses of voice broadcasting, important announcements, and anything else we deem worthy.  If there is anything in particular you’d like to see here, just let us know.  Additionally, we invite and encourage you to share your own experiences with our phone tree service.  If we find them valuable or interesting, we’ll add them here for everyone to see.

For those of you that are clients, thank you for your business.  For those that aren’t, welcome to Call-Em-All.  If there is anything we can do for you, please just let us know.

Sincerely,
Brad Herrmann
Founder & President, Call-Em-All