My Technology

We entered the world of telemarketing recently which opened up some interested issues with Do Not Call management in our databases.  I took a look at some outsourced solutions but in the end I decided to throw together a very basic SQL Script to handle this scrubbing.  Its a pretty basic script but it did the trick.

Additionally, I placed a last scrub date in our CRM that will prevent any telemarketing activities if we exceed the 30 day mark, as well as an ability to add internal numbers to the Do Not Call Database, and a function to run the DNC script whenever new leads or contacts are updated.

One of my issues is my phone numbers are stored as 10 digits and the DNC database I created has a column for area code and another column for phone.  I used the Right and Left functions to pull out the two parts.  Once a Do Not Call Number is identified it is replaced with ‘SCRUBED DNC’.  I chose to write over the numbers, you may wish to keep them and flag the record in another way.

CODE:

UPDATE  leadsDB

SET PHONE = ‘SCRUBBED DNC’

where right(phone,7) IN

(  select number from DNCNew

where  AreaCode = left(phone,3)

Tomorrow Embarq is coming out for our (hopefully) final site survey before going live with our 100 Mbs Metro-E Internet Connection.  With all of the exciting things we have done recently technology wise our dual T1s just aren’t cutting it.

Hopefully within a few weeks we will be going from 3Mbs to 100Mbs of bandwidth to run all of our wonderful Internet marketing, phone system and other technology.  Do I really need 100Mbs? No.  However I am hoping all of that extra bandwidth is going to keep me motivated to find ways to use it.

We were lucky because our building already had fiber running into the demarc and all of that wonderful fiber was being used on 3 maybe 4 T1 lines which was a complete waste.  

My current uses for the bandwidth include:

• Hosting our Delmar DocumentTrac Server for Document Imaging
• Hosting our Delmar Datatrac Webtrac Server
• 50 SIP Trunks for our Asterisk Open Source Phone System
• 100 SIP Trunks for our Vicidial Open Source Predictive Dialer
• Hosting 50 – 60 Marketing Web Sites (NO This Site is not one of them, my blogs are hosted by Dreamhost)
• Our in house Reverse Mortgage Software (written in Adobe ColdFusion)
• Our in house CRM System (written in Adobe ColdFusion)
• SmarterMail mail servers
• VPN for our remote offices in Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi (considering moving to MPLS)
• Hosting Remote IP Phones for all of our Agents who do not work out of Corporate