I often try to explain things in terms of metaphors. In the case of GroupCallertm, I’m excited to report that it’s up and running and we have even been able to schedule our first attendee into a webinar as a result of running it! BUT, as in virtually all roll-outs of software, we have to consider this the “beta” version until it’s working smoothly.
I like to compare this process to that of building a car. The car is all assembled and the engine is “in”. But it’s running rough and the the transmission won’t make the wheels turn. In this kind of situation, the car looks good sitting in the driveway, but it’s not going to take us where we want to go. First, the engine must be tuned so it’s firing smoothly on all cylinders, then the transmission has to be fixed so it engages and turns the wheels whenever you shift into Drive and press on the gas. THIS is where we’re at with GroupCallertm.
Last week, we used the system every day and we got the tiniest of response. But we also got a lot of good statistics and information from running it that will help with fine tuning the system so it will produce the results we expect. This is a technical matter and must be resolved as a team effort between Admin (‘me’) our sales team and our programming staff.
Specifically, there are 2 things we must adjust and correct:
- Incorrect Call Transfers: When the system calls, it’s designed to play a recorded message and ask the called party to “Press 1 to speak to a ‘live’ agent.” Under that scenario, the Remote Agents “ONLY” get calls from people who actually pressed a key on their phone, requesting to talk to somebody. Right now, the agents get plenty of calls transferred but most are the wrong type of calls:
- Voicemail greetings from the called party’s voicemail,
- “Live” transfers when somebody picks up the phone and says “hello”, and
- “Dead” calls . . . a call is passed to the agent but nobody is there
- Failing to Play Message: When a “live” party picks up the phone, they’re supposed to hear our recorded message. The current statistics indicate that such is not the case. After studying the numbers, it appears that (a) people pick up the phone and hear ‘nothing’ from us, or (b) fully 2/3 of the calls we make fail to go through (which might be an issue with our VoIP provider more than the program itself.
Although it’s very exciting to have this powerful new marketing tool at our fingertips, it’s also very frustrating that it doesn’t yet work the way it’s supposed to work. This is no surprise. We’re well aware that it takes a fair amount of fine-tuning to get most complex software applications to work exactly as designed. This is no exception.
I’m happy to report that we’re working on these corrections daily. On Friday, our programmer in Pakistan was advised of the issues and today I expect to hear from him with a few modifications to the system. I’ll continue to keep you advised as much as possible this week as the programmers and remote agents continue to work through the bugs in the system.
In the meantime, I’m planning to travel to Alaska on Wednesday as I mentioned last week. I’ll take my laptop computer with me so I’ll remain in contact, and expect to monitor and help to operate GroupCallertm while I’m gone. “The Show Must Go On!” as they say, even if I’m out of town for 6 days . Hopefully, I’ll be able to stay up on this blog even when I’m traveling.
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