I'm not surprised that Ahmed has not yet finished configuring the new servers. I just got a message from him that he's continuing to work on it. Yesterday I installed the new operating system and Jeff assigned the new IP's so that today, Ahmed could do his part. It appears that Ahmed started this morning. It's a pretty massive job to re-configure the entire GroupCallertm software system from a single server to operate across 3 servers with each one assigned to a different role, and yet they work seamlessly together. This is actually just the beginning of what I believe will grow to be a fairly large server farm before we even reach Phase II of our marketing strategy.
In the meantime, let me show you at least some of the results from last weeks' efforts. First, the good news. Throughout last week, I continued to work on the sales script and modify it to get better results. Better results are measured in terms of two things: (a) The number of seconds into the script people listen on average before hanging up, which directly affects (b) the number of people who Press 1 to get more information. Each day I used a new script and each day the # of seconds increased, except for day #5. That day, almost all calls failed due to a serious problem with the system in which almost 100% of the connected calls played a recording that was so choppy and broken up that it was unintelligible. The result was predictable: Very few responses that day, and the bad technology is reflected in the following graph:
We’re following a concept in the sales script that compensates people for attending a webinar. This is a very common and old direct marketing strategy: Give something of value in exchange for the prospect’s time to hear the sale pitch. We’re giving away 2 ports to everyone to attends the entire presentation. Upon registering for GloblaTmail, we award the ports whether they buy the software license or not. Of course, the graph above represents the only real victory for last week.
On the bad news side of the ledger, I’ll just give a quick summary. Essentially, 58% of of all connected calls fail due to incorrect handling of the call. In simplest terms this means that when somebody answers the phone, 58% of the time one of the following events happens:
- They answer “hello” and hear nothing, or
- Before the phone gets to their ear to say “hello”, our recording is already playing..
This graph represents the percent of all connected calls that failed last Monday to Friday:
Add to this the failure to detect 20% of the answering machines, and the times people press 1 but fail to get through (more than 50% of those who press one never get transferred to an agent) and we have a system that isn’t yet ready for “prime time”.
But, we’re getting closer. At least we “HAVE” the system now and we’re working on it daily. I’m anxious to try it out tomorrow and/or Thursday to see what improvements are made by using 3 servers instead of one to do operate the system. Both Jeff and Ahmed are predicting improvements, Ahmed more than Jeff. I’m just in the middle, HOPING for improvement but not certain we’ll see as much as we need. But I’m pretty sure we’ll see at least some improvement in our basic numbers tomorrow.
I’ll have another article posted tomorrow, but maybe not until after we’ve tested the system. That means I don’t think I’ll write anything until sometime at night.
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