I'm always amazed how fast time flies even when you're NOT having fun. Such is the case with my delay in posting another article. Each day I was certain I'd have some really big news to report; but such is not the case. In the 10 days since my last post, I have spent my full time trying to tune and tweak GroupCaller so it produces a good enough response rate to make a big difference in the sales volume of the company. So far, that hasn't happened.
Having said that, I want you to understand that we HAVE made progress, and very good progress at that. BUT, it's not enough to turn the proverbial corner. For example, this week we actually set several appointments for people to attend webinars and hosted 2 webinars with a 3rd this morning at 10 am. The result from the webinars is we have 2 prospects who have already stated they are buying the Standard Group Caller License for $1,000 each. They plan to pay us next week. We have 2 others that want to continue more follow ups with Keith and at least one will attend the webinar a second time. We're planning a much more aggressive calling schedule for next week.
As far as the technical aspects of GroupCaller, I made an agreement with Ahmed on the 4th of July for him to complete all adjustments during this past week and paid him extra to do so. It hasn't happened yet. That's partly our fault here because it's taking far longer than anticipated to listen to and analyze hundreds of calls. Altogether, we've made around 50,000 phone calls just trying to get it to work properly, and I expect we might make as much as another 50,000 calls before it's working to my satisfaction. So be it. Whatever it takes to get this working properly is what we'll do because we know the end result is worth it.
In the past 10 days I have also located 5 additional people with similar skills as Ahmed, and have begun a dialog with some of them. There's a strong likelihood we'll establish a working relationship with at least one more person with his skill set so when he's not available we'll have one or two others who already know our technology who can work with us to correct problems or make improvements.
Next week, I'm planning to run our first IVR (Interactive Voice Response) campaign. This is the classic voice broadcast that includes interaction with the called party for a response and has no "live" agents. We gather leads which must be called back. The obvious drawback to this system is the fact that we must call people back. You may not know this, but these days, a live person answers the phone only about 28% to 30% of the time. This means even if we get 100 leads, we'll only talk to 30 of them. The up side is the fact that we exercise much more control over the intensity of the promotion. In other words, we can call on the maximum number of lines for the maximum number of hours, rather than having to call only when agents are available and fill their shifts, most of which are part time. To date, we haven't spent more than about 3 or 4 hours in a single day making phone calls...and only twice did we do more than 90 minutes of calling.
I want to compare the results of both types of campaigns: IVR and "Live Agent". We'll see through experience which is most profitable for us. In the meantime, I'll spend most of my day analyzing our call activity from this past week. I'll provide a statistical report to you either tomorrow or Monday, depending on when I get the numbers calculated. I'm hoping to have it done before I sleep tonight so that Ahmed can do some of his work while we're resting here in the USA.
So, please check back on Sunday and Monday as well. I expect to have articles posted both days.
Comments