FastCall 411 Grows Legs, Part II
As we speculated a few weeks ago, FastCall 411 has officially taken its product portable so it can “live” on other local search sites.
The technology is a twist on click-to-call in preventing users from having to go down a list of providers until someone answers their call. Instead, it automatically calls a handful of them at once: The first one to pick up gets your business.
Businesses meanwhile get rewarded for picking up the phone more often by getting priority in FastCall’s relevance engine. As CEO Richard Rosen told me a few weeks ago, this also has interesting implications for tracking call length and other factors to surmise whether a call was successful in matching an appropriate service provider with a user’s need.
This is particularly relevant in some professional service categories where there is a level of nuance to the services that are practiced (i.e., dermatologists, lawyers). Otherwise, for reasons of urgency and availability, the technology is most conducive to trade service categories.
Tracking calls in this way allows the call length and other information to be plugged back into the relevance algorithms to make them smarter, and rank certain service providers higher for certain types of searches. It would also seem (my speculation) that the byproduct of this tracking could be some sort of consumer facing ranking system, similar to that practiced by Grayboxx.
The new portability, as mentioned, is a logical extension of FastCall’s value proposition and should give it more traction than it would on the company’s own destination. For more details on how this works, see the previous post.
