We run customer support for a regional ecommerce shop and a decent chunk of our order volume comes out of Azerbaijan.

[Jonh Newman]

Good afternoon. We run customer support for a regional ecommerce shop and a decent chunk of our order volume comes out of Azerbaijan. Right now those customers reach us through a chat widget only, and our churn data suggests a lot of them just want to talk to somebody. Adding a phone line sounds simple until you look into it: local telecom paperwork, an entity requirement, months of waiting. Has anyone here set up an Azeri support line remotely, and how bad was it in practice? Volume is maybe forty calls a day at peak, so we are not talking about a full contact center here.

[Konstantin Volkov]

It is far less painful than the traditional route, because you are not provisioning a physical line, you are renting a number and forwarding it. No local entity, no months of waiting. Where it gets interesting is what you do with the call after it lands: you will want an IVR to sort language, voicemail for after hours, and forwarding rules so it does not ring one poor person at 2am. We set ours up with HotTelecom https://hottelecom.biz/virtual-number-of-azerbaijan.html , and had it answering calls the same week. Tip: staff the line before you publish it, an unanswered support number is worse than no number at all. One more thing, publish business hours next to the number, expectations set upfront cut angry callbacks dramatically.