by thephaseusa » Wed May 09, 2018 8:07 am
Version: 2.14b0.5
SVN Version: 2975
DB Schema Version: 1543
BUILD: 180430-1834
4 Box Cluster of 1 Database, 1 Asterisk, 1 Web, & 1 Archive Server.
Fundraising Call Center
I took a telemarketing job in 1984 selling Shrine Circus tickets. In 1986 I opened my first call center, with land lines and manual dialing. In 2003 I bought my first predictive dialer, a Marketel 5 station box. By 2007 I had 13 of them, 65 stations, and had paid off those dialers, which cost me around $150,000. Marketel went out of business around around 2012. The “permanent, never-expiring product keys” they issued me when I had paid off the dialers worked until the company went out of business, at which time my dialers couldn’t call home to their servers in Canada anymore and verify the codes were good. So the next time I moved a dialer or changed any hardware, that dialer wouldn’t work anymore. I still have those dialers by the way. I recently decided to throw them in a dumpster, but I haven’t had the heart to do it yet. So, in the fall of 2016 I was approached by a company in the Philippine Islands offering me a lead generation service. I hired them. i provide them data to call, scripts, and voice recordings, and they began calling using avatar soundboards. I used them for around 6 months, and though I just broke even on the service, they called cold calls and generated us a lot of new customers, so it worked out well for me. They made the sales and transferred them to us to close. And guess how that transfer took place? Through a log in to a vicidial server. When I stopped using that service, I thought to myself, this VICIdial program is very cool, maybe I could use it myself without those guys. I first looked at GoAutoDial because it was centos based, and I had been running centos servers for years. But after installing it and looking at the interface, and seeing it didn’t look anything like the demo I looked at of VICIdial, I soon found vicibox, installed it on one box, and within a week started pounding them from VICIdial. This was March of 2017. I have a cluster of vicidial servers now, and have been using vicidial for a little over a year. When I first downloaded vicibox and installed it and started using it, I couldn’t believe it was real. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, the catch to be revealed. It couldn’t be free, it just couldn’t be. I was in shock for about a month. A gift from heaven. Unbelievable. I write these words and I feel a little guilty. Now I’m a regular vicidial user, I’m greedy for new features, and I’m asking about new releases and the latest improvements. Open source software is one of the greatest things on the planet. Matt you and the guys could have switched VICIdial to proprietary software a long time ago, and made a lot more money. Thank you for deciding to stay the open source course. You changed my life and my business for the better, and many more thousands of users as well. Thank you sirs!