Ding-a-Ling Answering Service 1987 Storefront Window - Beepers / Beepers /Beepers 2654 East Oakland Park Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 566-6767 Wide-Area Beepers / ‘Your Phone or Ours’
operator scripts so that we could cut back on errors. He told me he was ridiculed with abrupt comments that it will never happen. At that moment he decided to build his own software. One day this propelled us to become a far bigger company. One of the key limits of a call center is the cost of an operator station. Our closed systems had a lot of features, but they couldn’t support 100‘s of stations, nor could we afford them. Answering Service systems weren’t designed for scaling. Fast forward to 2014 and our answering service system is just under 150 positions, while the call center is close to 1,500 all running the software we built. (2018 - 2,500) With the installation of our new comput- erized systems, we transformed into a state-of- the-art Company. Pushing the edge, Stephen joined a local computer software hackers club, where he enlisted a couple of fellows to make a system that could deliver messages via fax machines. The advent of fax machines was another stunning new technology that every business was beginning to purchase. Thinking
he had something valuable, he incorporated it as, Mission Control Enterprise, Inc. and start- ed selling fax servers to our competitors. It wouldn’t be long before, he got a huge life lesson. The fellows who wrote the software could not figure out how to resolve the bugs that went along with the technology. This left Stephen spending countless hours every day supporting his customers. Luckily, before he shared any of the revenues, he contacted his competitor and handed him the clients and the money. Bruised, he got his life back. Undaunt- ed, he tried again with another product and succeeded. Our operation (1976) was in the backroom of a storefront retail building. It was just a little wider than a trailer with a single small office. In 1985, the storefront contiguous with our back office became available. We took a chance and rented it. Now we had a rather large room, bigger than the whole operations area with access to the main street. I put up a sign out front as large as I could on top of a green awning stating
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