Alerts Online

Overview
Advertise
Solutions
Pricing
Next Steps

Overview

What can I do with the Alerts Engine?

The Alerts Engine provides you with a low cost, innovative and simple to manage way of communicating with your customers. Through effective communications you can improve customer service, drive down costs and increase efficiency of your business.

Alerts Online offers a selection of channels by which to contact customers, such as; email, SMS, fax and voice.

The Alerts Engine provides the tools for you to publish content, and for your customers to subscribe to it. Because we enforce a strictly opt-in policy, you can be sure that you're complying with all mass mailing and data protection rules.

We also offer services that allow you to charge the recipient for receiving messages. If you have content that you think people will want to pay for then this is a simple way to profit from it.

For some examples and suggestions of how the Alerts Engine could be used in your business, see the Solutions section below.

How can I use the Alerts Engine?

We offer a plate full of different ways to utilise the Alerts Engine. Take a look at the list below:

Publish alerts via the Alerts Online web site

This is the simplest solution and allows you to be up and running within minutes. Best of all it requires no development work on your part.

White Pages site, using your own company branding

We will provide a copy of our web site using your company branding
You can change the colour scheme to suit your company image
You can supply your own logo
You can use as a standalone site, or link it into your own web site to add a quick bolt-on alerting solution.
For a sample white pages site see http://www.alertsonline.net/vosa

Integrate into your own application / web site

We provide a set of SOAP interfaces (web services) which allow you to provide all the functionality of the Alerts Engine seamlessly from within your own web site/application
Because we use a standards based XML (SOAP) interface, the services are language independent, making it simple to integrate with almost any (web)application

Email to SMS

If you require a simple way to send mobile SMS messages from your existing email platform then our email to SMS service is just what you've been looking for
You send the email to the Alerts Engine, where it is automatically converted to an SMS and delivered to the users mobile phone
Requires no development on your part

Inbound SMS to Email

With our inbound SMS to email service your customers / staff can send a text message to a dedicated mobile number, where the Alerts Engine will automatically convert it to an email message and deliver it to your desktop
Combined with the email to SMS service (above) you can both send and receive messages to mobile phones via your existing email client
Requires no development on your part
We offer both full length mobile numbers and short codes

Advertise

I want to be able to place advertisements with Alerts online, what options are there?

We offer an advertising funded price plan to publishers, whereby we deliver their messages free of charge, if they accept to have a small advert placed at the bottom of the message.

If you would like to advertise on alerts in this way then please contact us to discuss a range of models and pricing.

Solutions

I want to send my customers information on my products

Keeping customers up to date on your products is a great way to ensure repeated custom. Many companies have some sort of email newsletter that their customers can subscribe to. The nightmares faced by these companies though is:

Complying with SPAM laws and data protection legislation
Dead addresses, where a customer has changed their email address, but not notified the mailing list
False/mistyped addresses. This could cause your messages to go to somebody that didn't ask for it, and get's your mail servers marked as SPAM senders
Required infrastructure and bandwidth for sending thousands of messages

The Alerts Engine takes care of all of this for you. We give you opt-in based alerts that allow the customer to manage what they want to receive and how. Because the customers addresses for all alerts are held in their address book, they only have to change their address in one place to update all their alerts, across all companies that publish via the alerts engine. This means that the customer is more likely to keep their addresses up to date. What's more, the Alerts Engine verifies all addresses, and they require activation, thus ensuring that all addresses belong to the subscriber.

The Alerts Engine is capable of delivering thousands of messages per minute, ensuring that your alert reaches the recipients in a timely manner. Because all delivery is done from our servers, it doesn't use up any of your valuable business bandwidth.

And don't forget, if you choose our advertising supported model you could have all this benefit at no cost! Contact us today for more information.

I am a journalist and want to sell my stories to people

Using our premium alerts service you can set up a 'recipient pays' alert. You set the price that you want to charge for your content, and specify the frequency. When the alert is delivered to the recipient, we deduct the money from their account and deposit it in yours.

As a journalist, this is a good way to sell your content direct to readers, or to newspapers, magazines and other publications. You just set up the alert and they subscribe to it. The more popular your content becomes the more money you'll make.

Any content can be sold in a similar way, so long as it can be attached to an email. E.g., Music files, pod casts, data, software, etc.

I want to be able to alert people about special offers

This is a standard newsletter type alert. You create the alert and publish the content. Any interested parties subscribe to the alert. So long as you have offers that people are interested in, they'll subscribe to it.

We take care of everything in between, including all anti-spam legislation.

For more information see the 'I want to send customers information on my products' solution, or contact us.

I want to offer vouchers to people for my products

This is very similar to the 'I want to be able to alert people about special offers' solution above. You can simply attach the voucher to an email alert as a PDF, or include the voucher as part of the email content. As well as the email channel you could also send vouchers via fax. These vouchers can be given for free, or you could charge for them.

I need to reduce the call volumes at my call centre.

Your organisation almost certainly interacts with its customer base via call centres or contact centres. The costs of contact centre can be as much as 10 to 15 pounds per call to process. A good number of these calls will be triggered by customers chasing the progress of forms and processes. When a customer sends in a form (say a benefits application) they will post it off without any knowledge of whether it has been received, is being processed, when a response will come and if and when any money will be paid. This often results in the customer ringing in with questions such as:

Have you received my application?
When will you process it?
Is it successful?
How much will I get?
Has the money been paid in?

With each call costing 10 to 15 pounds to process, this is obviously an area in which great saving can be made.

You can use the Alerts Engine to radically reduce the number of process chasing calls by simply pushing the event information to the channel of the customer’s choice
(e.g., email, SMS, fax or automated voice) . It requires little or no technology change at your end as we can provide the simple tools to drive this process (you can integrate if you like).

The savings are clear. For example:

If you have 100,000 application forms in per month and 20% of those people call your call centre.
At the ten pound per call it is costing you £200,000 per month.
If you send out 2 SMS messages per customer, per application form "We have received your form and will process by X date" and "We have processed your form and you have been successful, your money will be paid by Y date".
The savings, based upon a 30% reduction in those call types would be just under £50,000 per month (this figure is after all costs of SMS have been taken into consideration). A significant saving and more importantly, improved customer service.

I need to reduce the number of missed appointments.

It is no secret that missed appointments cost organisations significant amounts of money, ranging from anything between £70 to £1000 per missed appointment. We've proven that a simple reminder to the customer in advance of an appointment can reduce the number of missed appointments by 20% or greater.

Take this example of a typical business. The calculations are included in brackets, so it is easy to build a business case for yourselves and adjust the figures to suit your business:

Cost of Alerts Online messages to business = £0.07
Cost of missed appointment to business = £70
Total number of business appointments per year = 20000
Current percentage of missed appointments = 8%
Number of missed appointments per year = 1600 ((d) * (c))
Cost to business of missed appointments = £112,000 ((e) * (b))
Cost to send a message to every appointment = £1,400.00 ((a) * (e))
Number of appointments attended to break even = 20 ((g)) / (b))

As can be seen from the figures above, only 37 appointments need be attended or cancelled and reassigned to break even. Using this simple method to remind customers can lead to huge savings, and reduces waiting lists where missed appointments would have had to be rescheduled.

The principle can be applied to any appointment, e.g.;

Remind the unemployed when their job interview is
Remind people on probation when their next appointment is
Remind people of doctors appointments
Remind people of visits by social workers

Anywhere that lost appointments cost your organisation money the Alerts Engine can be used to drive savings and customer service improvements

I want to remind my customers of their obligations.

Regulatory burden is a key problem which your organisation may be aware of. The transformational Government work is looking at the regulatory burden and encouraging reductions where possible. That is not to say all regulation is bad but where we can reduce the burden we should do. The Alerts engine can help with this problem. Where your customer’s have obligations it is a simple courtesy to remind them ahead of the deadline. This results in a more compliant customer base and less chasing and fines processing in many cases.

Many organisations send out their reminders by post. The cost of preparing and sending a letter through the post can be as much as £3.50 per item. Sending the reminder out via the Alerts Engine as a PDF email attachment can be achieved for less than 1% of this cost. By removing the requirement for as much paper, significant environmental savings can be claimed on top of being more effective for the customer. You can also send the same message to multiple destinations for the same customer for the same price, thus allowing the customer to receive the message at home and at work.

I want to offer SMS as a channel into my contact centre.

SMS is a channel which nearly every person in the UK is familiar with. It is estimated that there are two mobile phones for every person in the UK.

By using the Alerts Engine you can easily allow your customers to communicate with your call centres using SMS. We offer an email to SMS and SMS to email facility. We can provide a short number or a full mobile number for your customers to text to. We convert that to an email and send that to the email box of your choice (typically your inbound customer email address). Your call centre agents can then respond back to the recipient using email and we will convert that back to SMS and send to the customer.

There are some significant benefits to this:

You only use the existing email technology at your end so no technology changes are required. Simply switch it on and you are ready to go.
Your HR policies already cover the use of email and as all SMS leaves via your email system your HR policy will already cover the SMS usage.
Your email systems will already have the appropriate audit trails in place so no new audit work is required.

The system is easy to adopt, easy to use for the agents (it’s just sending an email!) and provides a new channel for your organisation and customers at next to no cost.

I want to contact my customer base in an emergency

There are circumstances where you just want to get information out to as many of your customers as possible. The Alerts Engine copes with a huge volume of messages and can be relied upon to get your message out to your customer base in rapid time. We already provide such a service to Defra and have been notifying farmers of the Avian Flu incidents within hours of detected break outs ensuring that farmers and poultry owners are able to act to reduce the spread of the disease.

The same principle applies to a wide range of emergency situations. Why not talk to us about your requirements.

I want to improve the quality of my communications.

It is not unusual for an organisation to collect address information from their customers. One of the issues with this process is that you have large number of customers and they interact with a large number of different organisations in government who also collect the same information. What this means for alerting scenarios is that a customer may leave the email and SMS address at a number of web sites, and when their addresses change (which they do regularly for email and SMS) then they do not return to the dozen or so places it has been left. This leaves the organisation with a rapidly deteriorating address list quality.

There are other negative effects of this process. When a customer changes their provider their email address may change (from say yahoo to google). The original email address, and SMS if they are pay as you go, will then get reused by a new customer. They will then receive the original customer alerts and make complaints or mark the email as spam. Having your emails marked as spam affects all of your customers and can often lead (rightly) to blacklisting.

By using the Alerts Engine, the customer manages their addresses in one place. By updating their email address in one place will mean all their existing alerts will be directed to that new address seamlessly.

If you want to improve your communication hit rate and reduce your address management costs then Alerts Online can help.

I want to charge for the information I provide to my customers.

Some organisations are trading funds and may want to recover the cost of information provision or to charge for the information they provide. The Alerts Engine has a billing function which allows your organisation to either share the costs of communications with your customers or to generate a revenue from that information.

For example, you may be happy to supply email alerts to users but not pay for SMS. In which case you can offer the email channel for free to your customers and we can charge the customer the costs of the SMS if they wish to use it.

If you currently sell information (say training material or health and safety material) you can charge the customer a pre agreed price to receive the information. This can be any content you can attach to an email (straight forward PDF information or even software and updates). We will do all the billing and you simply receive the revenue from us.

I want to use mobile phones for 2-factor authentication

Alerts Online work in partnership with an authentication technology provider. We can work together to provide 2 factor authentication (something you have and something you know) for your organisation. By utilising the mobile phone the customer already has we can massively reduce the cost of secure authentication over the cost of other bespoke solutions (such as the small calculators provided by some banks). It is both easy to use and very secure.

Please contact us for further information.

I want to reduce the amount of paper we send out to customers.

Posting out information and alerts to your customer base costs your organisation a significant amount of money every year. Not just in the printing costs and design overheads but in the post costs and processing the returns.

On top of these monetary costs there is also the cost to the environment to consider. Making paper not only destroys many trees, but also requires many chemicals and pollutants. With green awareness so high as it is today, it's a huge benefit to be seen as making an effort to be green, and reducing your carbon footprint.

Alerts Online can work with you to migrate your customer base to receiving their information in electronic formats producing significant savings:

No printing costs
More agile (no need to design print)
No post costs
Reduced number and easier to process returns

Alerts Online would be pleased to work with you to make efficiency and customer service and environmental improvements in this area.

Pricing

We offer a variety of different pricing models to suit all types of businesses:

Publisher pays price plan

No Subscription Fee
With this price plan the publisher pays for the cost of delivering the message to the recipient.
We charge a very small cost per recipient, plus the cost of delivering the message. The delivery costs range from free to a few pence, depending on the delivery channel (i.e., email, SMS, fax or voice). We do not charge any commission on the delivery costs, so the price you pay is the same as the price we pay.
The publisher can deliver the message to as many channels as they like, for only 1 charge per recipient. E.g., They could send the same message to a recipients work email, home email and mobile phone. They'd only pay 1 x recipient charge plus the cost of 1 SMS delivery (email delivery is free).

Advertiser pays price plan

No Subscription Fee
This is our most popular price plan, as it is free to the publisher for the email channel
There is no charge per recipient for emails or faxes
There is no delivery charge for emails
There is a small charge for delivery of faxes, SMS and voice messages

Recipient Pays

No Subscription fee
With this price plan you can choose to offset some or all of the delivery costs to the recipient
You choose how much you want to charge for each alert and for each channel (i.e., email, SMS, fax or voice)
The recipient has to agree to the costs before subscribing
Use this price plan to sell your content and make money
We handle all the billing from the recipient and deposit any profits in your account

NOTE: You can offer alerts via more than one channel. For instance you could offer an alert via email or SMS. The email is free, and the cost of the SMS can be charged to the recipient. The recipient chooses which channel they want to receive the alert on, the free email or pay for it as SMS.

Price plans can be mixed and matched on a per-alert basis. I.e., You can have some alerts advertiser funded, charge recipients for some other alerts and choose to pay the delivery charges yourself for other alerts.

Sign-up via the publisher management site to calculate prices, or contact us for more information.

Next Steps

If you would like to talk to us regarding the Alerts Engine, and how it can be utilised in your business, please use the contact us page on this web site, or alternatively email us at info@alertsonline.net.

If you just want to dive right in and get started, then you can sign up as a publisher today by visiting our publisher management site.