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Wouldn’t it be great if your near and dear ones could use your Spokn credits to call you from their regular phones when they wish?

We’ve thought of a Collect call feature that allows them to do just this – instead of they paying to call you, we use your Spokn credits for the same. We need feedback from you on whether you would like to make use of this facility – or not.

In short,

When you call your favourite contacts, Spokn displays a unique USA phone number as your caller ID. Whenever they want to call you back, they just give a missed call to this USA phone number and Spokn automatically calls them back and connects them to you.

The long version

1. You activate the Collect call service on the Spokn website (free)
2. You provide up to 5 phone numbers of your favourite contacts. Spokn allocates a USA phone number for each of these contacts.
3. When you call these contacts using Spokn, they see a call from a USA (+1 country code) phone number. You ask them to save this number. Each of your 5 contacts will see a different USA phone number, so they will each need to save it separately.

To call you back, your contacts just need to dial the USA phone number they got when you called them.

1. Spokn sees a call coming from your contact’s phone number and disconnects the call immediately without answering it. Your contact is NOT CHARGED by their operator for this international call.
2. Spokn then initiates a call to your contact’s phone number and once the call is answered, initiates another call to your Spokn ID, which rings on your Spokn dialer / device.
3. Once you answer the call, the conversation continues as usual and just like before, you are billed only for a call to your contact’s phone number (which you normally spend in any case)

If you are not online on Spokn, the call will be sent to your voicemail (billed like point 3 above). If you have enabled call forwarding, the call will be forwarded to your regular phone. Note that in case of forwarded calls, you will be billed for two calls – the call to your regular phone and the call to your contact’s phone number.

An example

You work in Dubai, UAE and your family’s in Kerala, India. You’ve enabled the Collect call service and your father has saved the USA number specific to him. Now -

1. He calls this number and Spokn disconnects the call immediately (he does not get charged for this)
2. He gets an incoming call from Spokn and answers the call. Spokn asks him to hold on while it connects to you.
3. You get an incoming call on the Spokn dialer, answer the call and talk to your father.

Spokn bills you at 1.5 cents / min since there’s a call that Spokn made to your father’s phone. This is what you would normally pay if you were to call your father directly.

In the scenario where you are offline on Spokn and the call is forwarded to your regular phone, Spokn will bill you at 17 cents / min + 1.5 cents / min (effectively, 18.5 cents / min) since it’s calling you on your Dubai phone and your father on his India phone.

Tell us if you like it

So, what do you think of this service? Would you want to use something like this? Help us decide by taking this poll, or talk to us in the comments section.

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