I got back on Tuesday and spent the day recovering from the trip and doing a little work. Yesterday, I had scheduled a test session with Ahmed and one of our Agents, but as soon as we started at noon, my primary system crashed and was not recoverable. We completed that session using my backup computer system. Since yesterday afternoon, I have struggled to recover my primary system without success. As I write this article, I am wiping the hard driver and reinstalling Windows. This is a major set back for me and will take many weeks to recover since I have to re-install numerous software programs as well as restore all data. I believe my backups were current, except that I may have lost my email backups and contact data. I won’t know about the backups until later today. At least I “have” daily backups - it’s a necessary thing in this business.
The test dialing session yesterday was successful despite my computer woes. Within 10 minutes of starting, Ahmed was able to locate the main bug preventing the system from operating correctly. We’re going to re-convene at noon today to re-start the test. If all goes well, we’ll run the system for awhile and see if it’s working OK. After this debug session, we have 2 other major issues to correct. Here are the 3 issues we’re dealing with:
- Irrelevant Calls Transferred: Many calls are passed through to the agent which should not happen, such as “live” transfers (the called party says “hello” and gets transferred to the agent without hearing the recording, fax machines, busy signals, ringing telephones, dead lines, answering machine voice messages, etc. None of these should reach the agent, yet all of them and more do. This issue was debugged yesterday and will be tested today. I’m confident we’ll resolve this major problem today.
- Incorrect Timing To Start Pre-Recorded Message: We’ve all experienced this – you pick up the phone and there’s a delay before somebody answers (that’s usually a call center). If the delay is too long, most people just hang up. We believe there are serious problems with the timing of the start of our recorded message so this has to be corrected before we can expect good results.
- Answering Machine Detection: Right now, I think we’re only detecting about 1/2 of the answering machines. We should be able to achieve 95% or more eventually. This is the lowest priority to fix and we should still do “OK” even if it takes awhile to get this corrected. Wasting time on voicemail & answering machines reduces the volume of business we can do.
Ahmed has committed to work closely with us this week with a goal of correcting enough of the above issues so that by Saturday, we’re able to conduct successful dialing sessions and schedule a reasonable number of people into webinars for the time and effort spent. I’ll keep you posted on the progress today through Saturday.
In the meantime, I’m working on my other PC and hoping to get it restored today. (sigh)
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