Technical advice need by the Guide to Chodosh

[Yoseph Herman]

Erev Shabbos, parshas Achrei-Kedoshim


I need advice from the friends of the Guide to Chodosh on a new technical
problem we are facing. Until now the only way for people to order the
printed Guide is to send a check. For the first time in the 39 years of
existence of the Guide, we would like make it possible to subscribe by
credit card. This would make it much more convenient for the subscribers
and would have major benefits for the Chodosh Project. However, I have
found problems in how to best implement the ability to take credit card
orders. I am asking for advice.


One part of this process was easy and is essentially done. Namely, we have
an account with a service that will take our input of the customer’s name
and credit card information and credit our bank account for the amount of
the subscription. The second part of the task, how to have subscribers
contact us to order the subscription is where we have trouble finding a
viable approach.

If we had an internet web site and our clients had access to the internet,
this second task would be easy. However, over the years we have honored the
psak we got many years ago not to have any part of the Chodosh project
encourage the use of the internet. With the recent increased awareness of
the dangers of the internet, it is even more imperative for us not to use
the internet to take subscription credit card orders.


If we had full time office staff such as found in Yeshivas or other
organizations, then the secretaries and other staff could take such orders
at least during day-time office hours. However, we do not have such office
staff available.

We have found at least one commercial Call Center that has operators
available 24/7 to take such incoming orders. However, such service is quite
expensive. We do not want to raise the cost of the Guide by several dollars
to make up such a cost.


There are IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems that could automatically
ask callers a series of questions such as name, address, credit card
numbers, etc and record the answers. Then the part-time staff that we do
have could enter this information into the service that would pay our
account. However, we have not found any vendor that offers such service
with safeguards to protect the confidential information being handled.


A suggestion was made to use Google Voice so that incoming calls could be
directed to several different locations of stay-at-home housewives.
However, the coordination of such a setup, and the collection of all the
data collected seems a formidable task.


It was suggested that we ask an organization with a full-time office staff
to volunteer to handle such order calls for us. However, we have no
knowledge of such an organization which could contribute their staff time.
We expect up to about 1000 orders being called in over about 4 months.


Our Chodosh Hot Line has been operating under the offices of Xchange
Telecom. The service has B”H been reliable. I tried to contact this group
to see if they can help. However over a 4-day period, I could not find
anyone to even talk to me or to respond to my questions by email.
(Surprisingly inexcusable response from a commercial organization.)


Any ideas from anyone out there would be greatly appreciated.


VERY IMPORTANT: DO NOT USE THE RESPOND FEATURE OF YOUR EMAIL PROGRAM
BECAUSE THEN I WILL NOT SEE YOUR MESSAGE. SEND RESPONSES TO
YHERMAN at EARTHLINK.NET OR YHERMAN at YAHOO.COM.



Thank you very much and tizku lmitzvos

Yoseph Herman/Guide to Chodosh
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