Thrashertm
02-04-2008, 02:39 PM
The current official precinct captain phone system is awful.
Yesterday I spent about 2 hours calling voters in a few precincts in Chicago. Out of the hundreds of numbers I called, about 50% were not home, 40% were bad #s, 8% hung up on me after I read the script, and 2% participated in the survey. None were Ron Paul supporters. Granted this is in liberal Chicago, but still....frustrating. The worst part was that I spent 90% of my time not talking to voters, just waiting and waiting for them to pick up or getting a bad number.
Also, those 50% that were not home - should I call them back? There are dozens of other precincts I could call still...
I am a consultant in the Customer Relationship Management industry (call centers), and I can tell you that the industry does this much more efficiently using a professional phone banking system. There's no reason why the official campaign, or a well-connected grassroots effort cannot organize this.
A better system would work as follows.
1. The campaign targets certain geographic areas for phone calling first, to allow volunteers to make a contribution to areas where Ron Paul is advertising and has some traction with the voter base.
2. Volunteers register online to assist with phone banking.
3. When they are ready to start calling they call into an official phone # and enter a PIN that corresponds to their precinct.
3. The ACD (automatic call distributor) calls voters and when someone picks up the phone it is routed to the volunteer.
4. Ideally, the caller's information would screen pop on the volunteer's computer during the call, allowing the volunteer to update it dynamically. This would require an additional layer of integration and complexity, which we could also achieve using a few manual tricks.
This would be far more efficient, and allow us to cover a lot more phone numbers. Those that are not home could automatically be cycled back into the queue to be called back a few hours later.
Your thoughts on how we can achieve this? Does anyone have experience in ACDs, Asterisk, or access to professional quality phone banks?
Yesterday I spent about 2 hours calling voters in a few precincts in Chicago. Out of the hundreds of numbers I called, about 50% were not home, 40% were bad #s, 8% hung up on me after I read the script, and 2% participated in the survey. None were Ron Paul supporters. Granted this is in liberal Chicago, but still....frustrating. The worst part was that I spent 90% of my time not talking to voters, just waiting and waiting for them to pick up or getting a bad number.
Also, those 50% that were not home - should I call them back? There are dozens of other precincts I could call still...
I am a consultant in the Customer Relationship Management industry (call centers), and I can tell you that the industry does this much more efficiently using a professional phone banking system. There's no reason why the official campaign, or a well-connected grassroots effort cannot organize this.
A better system would work as follows.
1. The campaign targets certain geographic areas for phone calling first, to allow volunteers to make a contribution to areas where Ron Paul is advertising and has some traction with the voter base.
2. Volunteers register online to assist with phone banking.
3. When they are ready to start calling they call into an official phone # and enter a PIN that corresponds to their precinct.
3. The ACD (automatic call distributor) calls voters and when someone picks up the phone it is routed to the volunteer.
4. Ideally, the caller's information would screen pop on the volunteer's computer during the call, allowing the volunteer to update it dynamically. This would require an additional layer of integration and complexity, which we could also achieve using a few manual tricks.
This would be far more efficient, and allow us to cover a lot more phone numbers. Those that are not home could automatically be cycled back into the queue to be called back a few hours later.
Your thoughts on how we can achieve this? Does anyone have experience in ACDs, Asterisk, or access to professional quality phone banks?