What can I do with Alerts Online?

Alerts Online provides you with a low cost, innovative and simple way of communicating with your customers. Through effective communication you can improve customer service, drive down costs and increase efficiency.

Alerts Online offers a selection of channels to communicate, such as email, secure email, SMS and fax.

We provide the tools for you to publish content, and for your customers to subscribe to it. Because we have a strictly Opt-in policy, you can be sure that you're complying with all mass mailing and data protection rules.

Alerts Online 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, this is a simple way to profit from it.

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

How can I use Alerts Online?

Alerts Online offers a range of services. Take a look at the list below:

Secure Email

It's a well-known fact that email is not a secure method of sending data. Because emails are sent as clear text, anybody 'snooping' on the network could read the contents of the message as it passes through. This means that most organisations sending confidential information are forced to still use regular post, with all the high costs associated with it.

To get around this problem Alerts Online has created a secure email system that guarantees the privacy of the message between the sender and the recipient.

Best of all, this system is simple to use as it requires no specialist knowledge or configuration. It runs like standard email. This is how it works:

For the publisher:

There is very little to do. Just set the alert type to 'Secure Email', we handle the rest.
Everything else is the same, like any other email alert.

For the recipient:

When a user signs up to Alerts Online, we automatically generate a unique secure email password for them.
We tell the user what this password is the first time they subscribe to a secure email alert (they can also view or change it from their settings page).
When the alert gets sent, the Alerts Online system creates an encrypted PDF from the contents of the message.
The message is encrypted individually for each recipient using that recipient's secure mail password as the encryption key.
The PDF file is then attached to an email and delivered to the recipient.
To view the secure contents of the message the recipient simply opens the attached PDF and enters their secure email password when prompted.
If the recipient does not have a PDF viewer installed (e.g. Adobe reader), or they have forgotten their password, they can still view the contents of the message by logging into their account on the Alerts Online website and viewing the message in their Secure Inbox.

Publish alerts via the Alerts Online website

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.
Just sign up, create alerts and they will show in the directory. We even set up your first alert for you!

Use your own company branding with our White Label option

We will provide a copy of our website using your company branding.
You can change the colour scheme to suit your company image.
You can supply your own logo.
You can use it as a stand-alone site, or link it into your own website to add a quick bolt-on alerting solution.
We host the site for you, so it will still benefit from our rock solid stability, security and high performance.
For a sample of a White Label site see http://vosa.alertsonline.net

Integrate into your own application or website:

We provide a set of SOAP interfaces (web services) which allow you to benefit from all the functionality of Alerts Online within your own website or application.
Because we use standards based XML (SOAP) interfaces, the services are language independent and simple to integrate with almost any website or application.

Email-to-SMS

A simple way to send SMS messages from your existing email platform.
You send the email to Alerts Online, where it is automatically converted to an SMS and delivered to the user's mobile phone.
Requires no development on your part.

SMS-to-Email

Your customers or staff can send a text message to a mobile number, where Alerts Online 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 account.
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 Supported Price Plan to publishers, whereby we deliver their messages free of charge, if they accept a small advert placed at the bottom of the message.

If you would like to advertise on Alerts Online in this way, please contact us to discuss the range of pricing.

Solutions

I want to send information on my products

Keeping customers up to date on your products is a great way to ensure repeated custom. Many companies have an email newsletter that their customers can subscribe to. However, newsletters can be problematic for several reasons:

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 or mistyped addresses, causing your messages to go to somebody that did not ask for it, which gets your mail servers marked as SPAM senders.
Required infrastructure and bandwidth for sending thousands of messages.

Alerts Online takes care of all of this for you. We give you Opt-in alerts that allow the customer to manage what they want to receive.

Because the customer's addresses for all alerts are held in their address book, they only have to update their address in one place for all their alerts, across all companies publishing on Alerts Online. This means that the customer is more likely to keep their addresses up to date. What's more, Alerts Online verifies all addresses and requires their activation, which means that all addresses belong to the subscriber.

Alerts Online 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!

I am a journalist and I want to sell my stories

You can set up a Recipient Pays alert using our Premium Service. You set the price for your content and decide how often you want to send it. When the alert is delivered to the recipient, we deduct the money from their account and deposit it in yours. This is a good way to sell your content directly 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, e.g. music files, pod casts, data, software, etc., as long as it can be attached to an email.

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. Interested parties subscribe to the alert. As long as you have offers that people are interested in, they'll subscribe to it.

I want to offer vouchers 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 your email content. As well as the email channel you can also send vouchers via fax. The vouchers can be given for free or you can 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 processing a call can be as much as £10 to £15. A lot of these calls will be triggered by customers chasing the progress of forms or processes and ringing in with the following questions:

Have you received my order?
When will you process it?
When will the product be dispatched?

With each call costing £10 to £15 to process, this is obviously an area in which great savings can be made. You can use Alerts Online to radically reduce the number of process chasing calls by simply pushing the information to the channel of the customer's choice (e.g. email, SMS or fax).

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, e.g.:

If you have 100,000 forms in per month and for 20% of those, people call your call centre. At £10 per call it is costing you £200,000 per month.
If you send out two SMS messages per application form, "We have received your form and will process by X date" and "We have processed your form, your product has been dispatched", the savings, based on a 30% reduction in those calls, would be about £50,000 per month (after all costs of sending SMS messages). 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 have proven that a simple reminder to the customer in advance of an appointment can reduce the number of missed appointments by 20% or more.

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

Cost of Alerts Online messages to business = £0.05
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 = £1,000.00 ((a) * (c))
Number of appointments attended to break even = 15 ((g)) / (b))

As can be seen from the figures above, only 15 appointments need be attended or cancelled and reassigned to break even. Using this simple method to remind customers can lead to huge savings and reduce waiting lists (where missed appointments would have had to be rescheduled). The principle can be applied to any appointment, e.g.:

Remind of doctor's or dentist's appointments
Remind of visits by your engineers or workmen
Remind of delivery schedules

Anywhere that lost appointments cost your organisation money, Alerts Online can be used to drive savings and customer service improvements.

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

SMS is a very popular channel: it's estimated that there are two mobile phones for every person in the UK. Alerts Online allows 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 to the email box of your choice (typically your inbound customer email address).

Your call centre agents can then respond to the recipient using email; we will convert that back to SMS and send to the customer.

The significant benefits are:

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 messages leave 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 call centre agents (it's just sending an email) and provides a new channel for your organisation and customers at next to no cost.

Of course, if you prefer not to use the SMS-to-Email route, you can fully integrate Alerts Online SMS into your existing contact management system using our SOAP (web service) integration.

I want to contact my customer base in an emergency

There are circumstances where you want to get information out to as many of your customers as possible. Alerts Online copes with a huge volume of messages and gets your message out to your customer base promptly and reliably. We already provide such a service to Defra; we have been notifying farmers within hours of detected breakouts of the Avian Flu 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. The problem here is that you have a large number of customers interacting with a large number of different organisations who also collect the same information. What this means is that a customer may leave the email and SMS address at several web sites, and when their addresses change, they do not update it. 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 (e.g. from Yahoo to Google), their email address changes. The original email address, and also SMS if they are pay-as-you-go, will then get reissued by the email or network provider to a new customer. The new customer will receive the original customer's alerts and mark the email as spam. Having your emails marked as spam affects all of your customers and can often lead to blacklisting.

By using Alerts Online, the customer manages their addresses in one place. 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, Alerts Online can help.

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

Some organisations may want to recover the cost of providing information, or to charge for the information they provide. Alerts Online has a billing function which allows your organisation to either share the costs of communications with your customers or to generate income from that information.

For example, you may be happy to supply email alerts to users, but not pay for SMS. In this 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 (e.g. training material or health and safety material), you can charge the customer a pre-agreed price to receive the information. So long as it can be attached to an email (e.g. PDF or even software and updates), it can be sent via Alerts Online. We will do all the billing and pass the revenue to you.

I want to use mobile phones for 2-factor authentication

Alerts Online works 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 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 also in the post costs and processing the returns.

On top of the financial costs there's also the environmental costs to consider. Making paper not only destroys trees, but also requires chemicals and pollutants. It is a huge benefit to show green awareness and be seen as making an effort to reduce your carbon footprint.

Alerts Online will work with you to make improvements in efficiency, customer service and environmental issues. Sending information in electronic formats will produce significant savings:

No printing costs
No postage costs
Fewer and easier to process returns
More agile (no need to design print)

Pricing

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

Sending email alerts via Alerts Online is free when you use our Advertising Supported Price Plan, where a small advert will be placed at the bottom of your email alerts. If you want to send email alerts without adverts, or send alerts to other channels (SMS or fax), there is a small charge. You can opt to pay this charge as the publisher or you can charge the cost to the recipient. You can also mix and match our price plans to suit your needs.

Advertiser Pays Price Plan

No subscription fee
This is our most popular price plan, as it is free to send email alerts.
There is no charge to receive emails, SMS or faxes (except for premium alerts).
There is no charge to send emails.
There is a small charge for sending fax and SMS.

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 (email, SMS or fax). We do not charge any commission on the delivery costs, so the price you pay is the same as the price we pay.
You can deliver the message to as many channels as you like, for only one charge per recipient. E.g., you could send the same message to a recipient's work email, home email and mobile phone. You'd only pay 1 x recipient charge plus the cost of 1 SMS delivery (email delivery is free).

Recipient Pays Price Plan

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 (email, SMS or fax).
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 you make into your account.

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

You can mix and match price plans to suit your needs. You can have some alerts funded by the advertiser, charge recipients for some other alerts and choose to pay the delivery charges yourself for other alerts.

Next Steps

If you'd like to talk to us about how to utilise Alerts Online in your business, use the contact us page or email us at info@alertsonline.net.

If you just want to dive right in and get started, you can sign up today.

Alerts for Business