Call Queues, looking for competitve solution

[Karl Stallknecht]

Ah no, please don't start charging for call recording :-( While the current system is a bit tricky trying to find and retrieve calls, it's super straightforward and we love the fact that we can use any FTP server. It would be nice if a simple interface could be written to access those calls easily (i.e. a link next to the call in the log). But I guess the advantage to AWS is that you can more easily write code to do this. I just hate paying for storage since we have tons of it available to us for free already.

[Rick Guyton]

Yea, I get the "we have free storage already" thought. But, wouldn't you pay say a 10-20% markup on AWS fees to have it all done securely, transparently and on AWS's highly scale able infrastructure? AND get the ability for clients to then use a built in app to play those files of AWS. Hell, I would in a heart beat. We all need to make money, 2600hz included and that's a lot of value in my mind... Again, not trying to speak for everyone. :)

[Karl Stallknecht]

If I recall correctly, 2600hz isn't doing the integration...they're just going to be making it possible to do. So we would still have to program out the functionality.

That wouldn't be a 10-20% markup though...right now the storage to us is practically free. AWS can be pricey when you have a lot of calls being recorded.

[Rick Guyton]

Yea, I was trying to make sense of Darren's comment about "we should charge for call recordings". Charging just for the ability to do call recording's doesn't make any sense. So I'm guessing he's talking about reselling the AWS storage at a small markup. I mean I'd be down with that personally.

[Darren Schreiber]

Hi, sorry, we have some enhanced call recording features coming out that are way more flexible then the current call recording stuff, and also have a GUI, and AWS integration, etc. etc. Some of this was demo'd at KazooCon. The GUI isn't done and neither is pricing, so I was really just commenting that you're giving me ideas on what would be acceptable.

But that said we are NOT ruining or removing the ability to do what you're already doing, and if you want to continue to build out your own call recording solution you absolutely can. In fact nothing we're building ourselves can't be done by you, too. So the real difference is, you can choose to pay us for a "pre-packaged" call recording solution (not just storage but linking to CDRs, on/off dynamically, etc.) or you can build it yourself.

So there's not really any restrictions on what you can do, the question is do you put your own labor and customization in (and thus it's "free"), hire someone to do it for you (in which case you pay someone else) or pay us a monthly fee for having done it for you.

I believe that's what we're discussing re: call recording.

All the above said, I'm intending to confuse you :-) All of this is premature because no decisions have been made on the new call recording stuff yet.

What I was trying to point out is that OVERALL, for all features (new and current) in the system, we need to do a better job covering our costs. Thus, I'm looking for better ways to spread out those costs amongst features people are willing to pay for. People don't actually WANT to pay for some things that cost us the most money to do and DO want to pay for some things that are just more convenient for them. So, like any business, we've got to figure that out now. Thus, the call recording question pricing/comments - you're giving me insight into your thoughts around what things should cost.

Ultimately if you don't feel you can sell it at the price we're offering it, then you won't sell it. If you don't sell it, we don't sell it, thus we don't make money either, thus we fail to cover our development costs. So we have an inherent goal to ensure we're pricing things both competitively but also in a way we're neither of us are getting screwed. (We may not be thrilled with the cost either but it should be manageable).

[Matt Lepacek]

A million companies offer queues for free.  The attempt to monetize the call queue functionality in a PBX in 2017 is a shame.  All the years of promising we'll at least have the functionality of FreePBX and this is what we get, $199/mo and $3-5 per user.  There's about 3 people creating their own Queue solution now that you have decided to go back on your word to us.  Breaking promises isn't a good way to migrate to your "open core" model.  Your trying to make more money in the wrong places.  Open up the queues for everyone, and start monetizing the apps on top of that.

[Rick Guyton]

Yea even with the new pricing they released I feel like they are way over valuing it. It's true every other FOSS solution has basic queues built in. It's a shame really. I feel like they would have had much more success releasing the core queue capability and upcharging for the sweet HUD I've seen and the reporting they are talking about.

It's putting me in a bad position personally. If they don't wake up on this pricing thing, I'm going to need to write our own queue service eventually. Or buy that guy's that's asking $3k upfront and maintain it myself. Then once you have it, it's hard not to want to sell it to others.... and well that's just going to get awkward fast. And I just don't want to go there, but I feel like my hand is being forced...

[Rick Guyton]

Yea even with the new pricing they released I feel like they are way over valuing it. It's true every other FOSS solution has basic queues built in. It's a shame really. I feel like they would have had much more success releasing the core queue capability and upcharging for the sweet HUD I've seen and the reporting they are talking about.

It's putting me in a bad position personally. If they don't wake up on this pricing thing, I'm going to need to write our own queue service eventually. Or buy that guy's that's asking $3k upfront and maintain it myself. Then once you have it, it's hard not to want to sell it to others.... and well that's just going to get awkward fast. And I just don't want to go there, but I feel like my hand is being forced...

[Matt Lepacek]

I know, it's not personal.  I just know myself and many others that made our own business decisions, set our own development priorities according to the expectation that we were going to get a open source core queue foundation.  We chose to focus on other projects than queuing because we knew this was coming, and now we're forced to look at 3rd party queue solutions that "give us everything we need", instead of helping to develop on top of the awesome queue foundation we had been waiting for.  If I knew queuing was going to be closed source and upsold I would have pursued other paths to solve queuing 2 years ago.  Thankfully, I have a Plan B and am pursuing that now.

I love 2600hz and Kazoo, I've been shifting more and more faith in the product & company for 4 years.  The open source model allows us to contribute with code instead of with $.  I always thought giving us that option was honorable, righteous and it feels like whining, and asking for something for free so I can go out and make money.  But, hey, thats the industry we are in, when Mark released Asterisk for free, he changed the game, and the VOIP market subsequently is what it is, its rooted in open source.  

Selling Reporting & the Operator Console's should be enough.  You simply can't charge $3 per user unless your already giving us some market-competitive analytics realtime & historical reports that we can in turn resell to our customers.  Basic queues free, Advanced queues paid.  That is the model that you told us was coming, and thats what actually makes sense from a hybrid open source/for profit company.

We aren't the one's who commented for years that you would be open sourcing call center.  So we can't be responsible for how we "sound" complaining that it's not free now when it's released.

OK, you spent $200k in salaries for development, we get that.  I'd rather pay a one time contribution of $2500.  Perhaps if we had the "kickstarter for kazoo" system 80 of us would contribute $2500.00 to make up for the $200k invested by 2600hz.  I don't know.  It's just a very odd direction to go in all of a sudden with this "open core" model.  

[Darren Schreiber]

I would entertain one-time fees for some fixed license or something. Is that what you're looking for? Sounds awesome frankly, I'd love to get the larger cash funds up-front. I thought you guys all wanted monthly fees that were small.

OK.

That actually sounds even better. If you are willing to do that immediately, drop me a note. darren@2600hz.com

Tell me the specifics of what you need. Indicate what your past contributions were. That will go a long way to lowering the price because it means you've got skin in the game, too, which is a big deal for us. We get VERY FEW contributions considering the amount of code we work on and maintain. I'm happy to figure something out. Happy to do one-offs.

The goal is to pay for our work, plain and simple. I'm trying to work with you guys here, all you're doing is yelling and calling us names. Ugh. We give away $6 million of labor toward the software we build and now it's "but why isn't THE REST ALSO free". Well, simple, we have bills to pay, too.

I have to be able to pay our staff, or you get NOTHING - literally, and that's not my fault, that's called life. If the staff don't collect a salary they can't feed their kids and they can't eat. We need a source to pay them. Contributions don't provide that and, frankly, we don't get many of those anyway. But if you've contributed a lot, then I'd be happy to trade, too. Labor cost is labor cost, regardless of who does it.

So, pick your poison.

But, really, you can't on the one hand say "we support you so much" then on the other hand when we actually need you to support the things we do because they cost a lot of money say "OMG WHAT IT COSTS MONEY?" Ridiculous.

If there's a middle ground, let's find it.

Rick you literally were the first one to write me saying how you wouldn't be able to feed your kids if BLF didn't work 100%. Well, back at ya, buddy. I was considerate and sympathetic to your plight. You seem completely unsympathetic to mine. And now on top of that, after I took your feedback and lowered the price (at the risk it will take longer, or possibly be never, to get paid back for our work), you're saying how we've somehow wronged you. Your behavior is pretty telling if you ask me. This is on TOP of the fact that you continue to maintain some secret group in the background where you try to get people to gang up on us and our product. *sigh*. Getting kind of tired of this frankly.

[Darren Schreiber]

Also, @Matt, a few notes on your comment specifically.

"The open source model allows us to contribute with code instead of with $."
We are working on a way to trade time spent on docs or code for money that you can then use to get licenses for free (or cheaper). I am happy to look at what you've contributed and use that as leverage to knock the price down (or make it free for you). I absolutely agree, if you've helped us with code, it's a big deal, and we want to reward you. We have a new system for forums I'm trying to launch that actually lets you do just that.


"I always thought giving us that option was honorable, righteous and it feels like whining, and asking for something for free so I can go out and make money."
It IS whiny and self-righteous :-) But I understand that comes with the territory. I also have the right to set boundaries. If you all are going to go out and use our work to make money, it seems like once in a while that bounty should be shared. We are not restricting or preventing you from using the base product yourself, or building your own version of call center, nor are we against other people making competing products in ANY way. If theirs is better, great! We'll offer it, too, and stop offering ours, because hey, I can go work on something else. There's plenty to do in telecom. Always been my motto.

"But, hey, thats the industry we are in, when Mark released Asterisk for free, he changed the game, and the VOIP market subsequently is what it is, its rooted in open source.  "
That one is a huge reach:
a) Mark did not release a full PBX product, he released a library + an engine. We are releasing the full product. It's NOT the same thing and most people who release a PRODUCT (even with Asterisk) charge for it, because the complexity, support and other maintenance requirements increase dramatically.
b) FreeSWITCH also has queues, and we use FreeSWITCH. You're welcome to add a small adapter to just go start using FreeSWITCH queues. So your "loudness" is unwarranted, you have a perfectly reasonable alternative available to you.
c) Mark also started a company called Digium as his business model, where selling cards would support Asterisk. Because he needed a way to support the work he was doing. He didn't JUST give it away for free, he found a way to continue supporting said free software with some paid income while leaving the free stuff available for people who don't want to pay. We've done exactly the same thing here. You are not required to turn on, or use, our call center. You can use, build or link to your own. Nothing has been crippled.

[Rick Guyton]

Ok, I'm just going to ignore the personal attack there. But, yea I'm in transition right now. I just divested in my MSP company, made a huge leap of faith in the 2600hz platform and my margin right now between when my family needs and what I make is uncomfortably close. I'm not super proud of that. But, you are right there. Then, right when there was no going back for me, my biggest client was seriously talking about moving away us/2600 because of BLF issues. So, yea, I was freaking out a little...

If you think I'm running some secret group to gang up on 2600hz we need to talk man. I help people out where ever I can and people feel free to call me with all sorts of issues they have. And I like to help out if I can. Most times we don't even talk about 2600hz. Often its networking stuff, faxing stuff, business plans or cool tangential services we can offer. But, I also hear a lot of complaints. I thought I was helping giving you guys a heads up when I keep hearing the same thing over and over. But if you guys are interpreting this as me CAUSING instead of REPORTING issues or if I'm aggravating things that's not my intention and I'll stop immediately. There is a monthly conference call, that I got rolling originally, but I'm not the one who sets up the call or the time anymore. In fact, I haven't even been able to do it anymore because I can't do the day of the week.

>after I took your feedback and lowered the price

Verbatium the email I sent Patrick about the pricing:

"For me it's all about the long term vision. To me, I need to know I can get under$5/agent including average queue and flat costs eventually. Maybe I need to have 300 phones on the system before I hit that. But, then that's just a number I have to hit. Right now, for me personally, both of these options serve the same purpose. To fill a short term problem that's preventing me from fully landing 70 more phones with my ***BIG CLIENT***client and allow me to start selling on that feature. More widely, from the resellers I've talked with they have a problem with the a /month+ b/month + c/month style pricing and they want you guys to "pick one". Even boarder view, I think there is a huge gap between what you built (awesome beyond words, and really worth every dollar you are asking for it) and what many of us really needed. Many of us just need to have callers go into a queue and have those calls round robin to agents as they become available. We don't need a HUD or real time call control or the fancy reporting you guys are talking about. We just need super simple queues like all the other FOSS solutions have already. And I'm not sure the value for this more basic need is worth what you are asking. I'm not saying there isn't a market for what you guys built. I do think it's there. But, I think many of us are going to have to get more comfortable selling much bigger accounts than we currently are before we are going to hit the market that wants the HUD and fancy reporting. Just my $0.02. Maybe too much info. Call me if you have any questions: ***My Cell***"

I tried to call on the front end to talk, but he wasn't available. I get it he was busy. I also left my number. Maybe I didn't convey it very well, but the old and the new pricing are pretty equal to me. Basically, they both are nearly equally unfit for my needs. Because I'm concerned about having some way to be profitable on the service eventually. But, I do think you will have better luck with some of the other resellers with it. At least I hope so. And I was going to do it either way because I figured out how to make it work, because I have to.

>You seem completely unsympathetic to mine.
Honestly, I can't relate to spending $6 million on anything. I really wish I could... I know it's got to be a ton of pressure. I don't know what numbers are going to make that work. But, I know that with both of the pricing plans you offered, I'm going to have to sell it at a loss. Even at scale. I can't do that forever...

> would entertain one-time fees for some fixed license or something.
I'm not sure if that was to me or Matt. But if it was to me, I am curious what that number would be. You know things are tight for me, but if I can make it work I will make the additional commitment. I do still believe in the platform. And the only thing that made me really waver was the BLF craziness.

[Darren Schreiber]

There are a lot of things that confuse me about your reply. The conference call thing - it certainly seems to be treated like a secret! We were literally asked NOT to join. Weird. We beg for feedback, get none or barely any, then hear about all these "complaints" via some secret conference call. Why aren't you sending these people here to talk about it? So unbelievably strange. I don't even know what to say to that one.

Anyway, as for the call queues thing, maybe I'm just not understanding you. We're trying to sell a call center product. It seems like you just want "queues". So if there is an element in the advanced callflow tool that lets you queue up callers and then ring whoever is available next, and that's IT, no other features (no custom hold music, no reports, one ring strategy, etc.) then maybe what we do is make a second version of this that's super, super, super basic and make that the cheap tier.

If that's the hangup, OK, got it. Let me go back to the team again and see if we can make another version of call center. We called this one Call Center Lite because we know it already lacks features people expect in a call center you pay for. But if you're going to compare us to FOSS stuff then perhaps what we do is provide a "Call Center Super Basic" that has almost no features, no support services, and a really crummy UI textbox like FreePBX has. Then we'll at least be talking apples to apples.

Let me stew on this.

But also, you said "For me it's all about the long term vision. To me, I need to know I can get under$5/agent including average queue and flat costs eventually."

We literally took that and made the pricing $7 at the high end, $3 at the low end, BEATING your price target, with a $99/month base fee. So we literally gave you your pricing. We set the $7 tier pretty low.

What am I missing here.

We effectively just offered you MORE features than you're asking for so you can go IMPRESS your client, and you're still complaining about the price? I literally have to be missing something here...

[Rick Guyton]

The queue price is $18 man. So it's $18/queue + $7/agent + $99. Take away the per queue cost and I'm pleased as punch

[Darren Schreiber]

I will work with the team to remove the dashboard component's live updating and some of the features, then remove the queue price. By doing that, we risk less work to maintain the special queue functionality we have, so you can meet your price point for your client. I can't guarantee my team can accomplish this because now they have to, ironically, program MORE stuff (which costs more money) so that we're capable of delivering less stuff, but at the same time if it keeps users and customers happy, I guess that's what we have to do.

And that way there's an upgrade path as well.

Thank you so much for all the feedback. Despite my frustrations, which are no doubt quite clear in this thread and based solely on how much time and money we spend on our work and feeling a bit under-appreciated for it, I actually really NEED the feedback and appreciate it.

We will find some happy medium.

[Rick Guyton]

Why not do a no-dashboard at all option like you were talking about above? With a crappy text box that's basically used 100% via the phones themselves. That's what I've been trying so hard to get across. A lot of us are doing 3-20 phone installations. A lot of them. those clients don't need and don't even want to load up the HUD. I know once I'm more comfortable with the service, I'm going to start going after BIG call centers. (that's why I'm working on a rapid deployment tool BTW) They will want and need the HUD and reporting. And they will pay for it willingly.

[Darren Schreiber]

OK, works for me.

Let me talk to Mark about removing the dashboard altogether, BLF light status for agent login/logout (since this is costly to us to maintain anyway), custom hold music, the works. I'll see what it would take to make a stupidly dumbed down version of what we've built.

So then you'll have two options.

And we'll continue persuing yet a third option, which includes the reporting, CRM integration, screen pops and eavesdrop/whisper/barge and we'll mark those up as the "high end" product.

The HUD product is a totally different discussion, has nothing to do with call queues.

Good stuff. Thank you for sticking with me here and sorting out the details until I understood.

[Rick Guyton]

So, if there's no BLF status, would you just have the phones permanently logged into the queue?

[Matt Lepacek]

What we need in CORE(free), in my opinion is:
* Multiple traditional call distribution strategies
* Custom Hold Music
* Login/Logout/Pause via phone & Cross-Bar API
* Webhook & Websocket (blackhole) events for new call enqueue, agent login, agent logout, queue call hangup before answer, queue agent call answer, queue agent call ring, queue agent call on hold, queue agent call hold release, etc...

[Darren Schreiber]

You'd still have the star-codes to login/logout.

[Rick Guyton]

How could we notify the customer if they get logged out so that they know to log back in? AFAIK most FOSS queues statically assign users to queues in the config. There's no logoff/on. Maybe we could get an email?

Like:

Subject: You have been logged off of Sales Queue
Body: You have been logged off of the sales queue due to inactivity.

EDIT: Just looked at Matt's list and that'd about do it. If we had webhooks for queues I could generate those emails myself. Seems weird that custom music would be removed. But, I could work with that as long as it defaulted to the account music at least.

[Darren Schreiber]

I will look at what other FOSS solutions provide and get back to you on this. I can't provide a timeline or anything on what features. I get the message on what you want now (I think).

[Darren Schreiber]

Thank you all for your feedback on this thread. I really do appreciate it and I will take all your requests under consideration.