I reported recently about our network problems. During the past week, another disturbing issue arose, and that was intermittent failure of our primary Internet connection. As with many clouds in life, there was a silver lining to this one as well. This problem resulted in a terrific upgrade to our bandwidth!
Yesterday I was “down” much of the day because I had a technician come here from our ISP to trouble shoot the problem. After hours he was unable to identify the problem. We both speculated it was a hardware issue within the router itself so the router would have to be replaced.
He did not have a replacement router for the same service in his van. However, he did have a brand new router for upgraded service. After discussion, I agreed to go ahead and do this upgrade. I had planned to do this upgrade in the near future anyway to ensure we had plenty of bandwidth for outbound calls. As of today, we’re now running a 50 meg connection (download) with 10 meg upload. With this connection we’ll be able to call out on 450 to 500 channels simultaneously! That’s a capacity of up to 400,000 calls a day without having to move to a new location or get more bandwidth. However, to do that many calls we would have to add one or two more PC’s to our server farm. (That shouldn’t be a problem as long as we’re closing any reasonable number of sales from this campaign.)
I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. We are NOT by any means prepared to do anywhere near that kind of call volume. To make 400,000 calls in a single day would require many well-trained Remote Agents who are very skilled at closing. We’ll have to work our way up to that volume one step at a time. Also, we have some very real hard costs when making outbound phone calls. That many calls would cost us close to $1,000 in a single day (and that’s a payment that must be made BEFORE we make the calls. So naturally, we can grow the call volume only as fast as the cash receipts from sales will allow.
Because of the change in ISP service yesterday, we weren’t able to meet with Ahmed. However, I was able to resolve 2 very important issues after the upgrade. First, I got our new IP address provisioned with our VoIP provider. This means we’ll be able to make calls through the system because the VoIP provider will recognize our new IP. Second, after the new higher bandwidth was available through the new router, we were successful in provisioning the new block of IP’s on this account. As of this morning, the network is looking solid again.
Jeff had to go to New York on business Sunday and won’t return until the weekend. This means our time to meet with Ahmed is limited to nights this week. Our next meeting with him is scheduled for 11 pm tonight (1 am for Jeff in New York). . Hopefully, we’ll be able to make a few calls tomorrow despite the fact that Jeff is out of town. If the test calls go well, I am hoping that Saturday might be our first day to make real calls under the Phase I campaign. We’ll only have 2 Remote Agents to start: Melanie and Nathan. After they learn the system, we’ll add Keith and Patience. We have several more to add once we feel comfortable with the system.
I can also report that progress on the Money Messagingtm manual has been slower than expected. It’s up to 106 pages this morning and close enough to completion that I believe I’ll finish off the first draft by tonight. After that, proof-reading will begin and final production should take place by the end of this week. This manual is essential for bringing new Remote Agents into the GroupCallertm system so we can dramatically expand the sales volume. Because of this progress, we should be able to start conducting sales webinars again next week. It has been well over a month since our last webinar. I’m looking forward to ending the month of May with an aggressive sales effort that continues to grow throughout the summer.
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