The biggest news for the company at the present time continues to be centered around upgrading our GroupCaller system. As is usually the case in the world of software development, we rarely see programming or hardware origination, upgrades or changes accomplished on the exact schedule we hope or predict. Such is the case here. Nonetheless, solid progress has been made.
Regarding the new VoIP provider, we have executed the contract with our new VoIP provider. In reality, this new contract is perhaps the most significant part of the upgrade. This is due to the fact that, if we DIDN’T get a price point in the range we are now paying for VoIP service, it wouldn’t be possible to pursue the massive roll-out of this calling campaign to promote GlobalTmailTM to companies and individuals all across the USA. Our rates are now $0.0099 per minute with a $0.00099 price for every 6-second increment. This means, a 30-second call is going to cost us only $0.00495, which is less than a half-a-penny for that call. If we had done what MOST companies (even BIG companies) do, we’d be paying something in the range of $0.02 per call. This means a 30-second call would cost us 4 times as much, and a 12–second call would cost 11 times as much. Considering the fact that MOST connected calls we make are less than 30 seconds in length, and often only 10 seconds or less (because the vast majority of people just hang up on the pre-recorded call), this is incredibly significant to our bottom line. Also, as soon as we can afford to pay a higher amount for our minimum purchase (which we expect to do within the next 30 days), our price will drop by 20%! This is by far the best below-wholesale pricing structure we’ve had available to us to date, and it’s the best I’ve seen in my 38-year business career. As is true in many business ventures, controlling costs has as much and often more to do with profits than the volume of sales.
With respect to the software upgrade, it’s proving to be time-consuming, which is not surprising to us. This is because we opted for a less expensive but more robust technology. This requires much more original programming from our skeleton-crew staff than if we had gone with an “out-of-the-box” solution. This is OK with me, since we’re vitally interested in the long-term effects. The development we’re doing right now will apply to our over-all application and will move the company down the road much better than any of the pre-packaged software vendors could offer us. Furthermore we have much more control over the end product.
Let me give you just one very, very significant upgrade we’re able to do because of the decision to go with the more labor-intensive solution we chose. When we conduct a call-campaign to obtain an IVR result (i.e. when we’re asking questions of the called party and they speak to our computer system in answer to questions), the old system (as well as the off-the-shelf alternatives) had no capability of capturing the type of responses we’ll be capturing in our new call-flow campaign. Before, to get a name, we simply ask “What is your name?” and wait for the person to respond. To get their phone number, we ask “What is your phone number?” and wait while the person speaks, etc. To enter those results in a database for sales people requires a lot of manual transcription (i.e. somebody listening to the response and typing it into a database). Now, to capture the most vital information that allows us to call them back and follow up, very little manual transcription is required because we can capture most results with key-press on the phone and speech-to-text technology as follows:
- CAPTURE A PHONE NUMBER: We’ll say something like “. . . to get the information to you, we just need to verify your phone number and name. First, is this the best phone number to call back on?
- <TEXT-TO-SPEECH READ BACK PHONE NUMBER TO THE CALLED PARTY> Press “1” for YES, Press “2” for NO.
- “1” – Thank them and move to next question
- “2” – Ask them to speak and tell us their phone number (the response is recorded with their voice)
- CAPTURE A NAME: We’ll say something like “. . . Next, we need to verify that we have your correct name, because lists are sometimes not accurate. The name in our list is
- <TEXT-TO-SPEECH READ BACK NAME> If this is correct, press “1”, if not, please press “2”
- “1” – Thank them and move to next question
- “2” Ask them to speak and tell us their correct name (the response is recorded with their voice)
- GET BEST TIME TO CALL BACK: We ask “. . . What’s the best time of day for us to call, morning, afternoon or evening?”
- Press “1” for morning
- Press “2” for afternoon
- Press “3” for evening
With the above methods, we can use the speech-to-text engine combined with key-press response technology to have our computer system talk to the called party and capture results with no human intervention on our part. The less people have to SAY to a computer, the more and better information we’re likely to get. In the “olden days” people didn’t really have these options and would have to talk to our IVR recording system. But now, people are accustomed to pressing buttons on their phone in response to questions or to get to the right department, etc. Taking the time and effort to write this code for ourselves produces a much more sophisticated system and one which will apply to many of our other services as well. We also expect a higher response rate, not to mention the fact that this will greatly cut down on the amount of human intervention needed to transcribe each response. Many of the responses won’t require human transcription at all! This improves the accuracy of the leads we capture with GroupCaller, which in turn improves our sales and conversion percent.
I’m expecting to make our first test calls from the upgrades by the end of this week. We’ll start testing on only 2 lines. If that goes well, we’ll expand to 4, 6, 8, etc. up to as many as a dozen lines for further testing. We won’t expand beyond about a dozen lines until we have fully tested our two primary campaign types and know which one is more effective: ( a ) Call transfer and ( b ) IVR Response. Of course, the advantage to call transfer is that our Associate doesn’t have to call the prospect back, which results in a “no answer” 65% of the time, which is required by the IVR response (Interactive Voice Response…a recorded human voice). By the same token, there’s a “down side” to to the call transfer, and that’s the fact that far more of these people are just “kicking the tires” so to speak. They aren’t necessarily as high quality of a lead as the person who takes the time to answer several questions.
Although it’s taking a little longer to get the full upgrade in place, I’m feeling very positive about the progress and believe we’ll begin seeing results on this effort by the end of the week. Don’t forget, the end result of this nationwide campaign has a single focused goal: 2,500 AMG Members within a 6 to 8 month period. We know we’ve got enough numbers in the database to call which will result in sufficient prospects to reach this goal. And we know that acquisition of this many AMG members will result in the cash flow required to hire and re-hire a programming staff large enough to complete the software development necessary to roll out all of the services we have announced.
Onward and upward!
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