Our Post-Conference Updates
Some quick updates from our experience at NAEO conference this year!
Customers, feel free join us at office hours today at 3pm ET. I'm hoping to review some of the updates Amtelco gave at conference.
Call Theory Office Hours Details for Customers
As a reminder, we're off on Thursday (no Scripting Sessions).
What you can expect if you continue on:
- I forgot to send the pre-conference email
- The saddest free-drink event ever
- My tech challenge missed the mark
- Billing repo goes public next week
- Documentation visibility changes
- Secret conference details
The Pre-Conference Email Debacle
Self-promotion, marketing, and sales are not my strength. We can all agree on this.
A customer once told me:
Nobody knows about the cool things you're building if you don't tell them about the cool things you are building.
So this year, I attended the NAEO conference as a Platinum Sponsor. It was the biggest marketing spend I've ever done:
- travel and lodging for Jay & I
- conference sponsorship
- exhibitor materials/apparel/marketing
- 3-day room rental for the village
- free-beer hour in the village room
It was out of characteristic for me, but I was hoping to make a "big splash"
So, in typical "Patrick" fashion, I forgot to send the nicely crafted email to conference attendees before the conference.
The pre-conference email also had instructions for finding the Call Center Village room - which would have sent more people there! There were also instructions on how to enter the 1TB SansDisk USB drive using the enclosed purple tickets, which many people missed until our 10-minute presentation.
But since I packaged everything in a plain-white envelope and never sent the email, nobody bothered to open it until they saw my sponsor presentation.
I bet at least a few of you are thinking, "What envelope?"
The Saddest Free Beer Event Ever
So that free-beer hour? Only the IT attendees I direct sent invites to the party came, and even then it was only a small portion of them.
I was so afraid of going broke for over-consumption that I forgot to promote the event; and we got maybe 10 people total outside of Jay and myself. Good for my wallet, but didn't quite have the exposure I was hoping for.
For example, I tipped the bartender ahead of the event more than the total consumption spend of the event ended up being. (And I'd do it again, too.)
Call Center Village was ...there!
Did you know I had a security challenge for IT/technical-identifying people at conference? It's based on a remote agent, main office, and hosting environments for a typical small-business Telephone Answering Service (TAS.)
Probably not, because I forgot to send the email.
The conference crowd was not very technical – about 20 of 180 used a title that included IT/tech. While I knew ahead of time that the village might not go over with the audience, it still had the intended effect: I got to do my first real-world village.
To that end, it went well and we're hoping to move Call Center Village into additional (security) conferences in the future. We were encouraged from giving a postmortem at our local DEF CON group which was apparently well received.
I did use the extra Call Center Village badges and stickers to bias everyone. though.
Starbase Billing Updates
With my impending travel later this week, I've decided not to try and force the release before I leave.
I still have a few things I'd like to do before making the source-code repo public:
- Additional feature/unit test-coverage needs added for latest changes
- A baseline level of documentation needs published
- Cleaning up some UI glitches from a new-to-me framework (flux)
- I want to squash the git history and database migrations
- I need to figure out how to demo with anonymized data
- A small-mental health break before I go full-bore after release
This means you'll have to wait until I get back next week before you can start checking things out on your own.
Call Theory Product Documentation
Currently, customers can find the documentation for our Mission Control utility dashboard on our learning portal (learn.calltheory.com) - but you have to be logged in.
With the addition of Starbase to our managed products, we're going to host the official documentation for Starbase (publicly) at learn.calltheory.com/starbase.
We're also opening the documentation for Mission Control to be public, so both products will have easy to find and use documentation.
Long term, I hope to align Mission Control with an FSL or MIT license depending on how the experiment with Starbase FSL licensing goes.
Expect this change to go live next week when we publish the documentation and make the repo public.
The Shadow Conference
This was the first time I've been to an industry conference where I wasn't allowed to attend the sessions that Amtelco presented.
This included the HA, Infinity (x2), Scripting, API, Ellie, IS updates, and FDC meetings. A shame, since I work on and support these technologies for my customers.
My opinion is this will lead to the centralization of IT/tech support towards Amtelco and vendors who are also regular members.
My collection isn't nearly as good as others out there, but here's what I've got:
