Alerts Online

Overview
Solutions
Case studies
Next Steps

Overview

The Alerts Engine is provided to Government through the Government Gateway Common Infrastructure programme. The engine forms part of the strategic government shared infrastructure helping to drive transformation, customer centricity and efficiency savings.

The Alerts Engine provides a number of benefits for government and the customer (citizens and business)

Shared infrastructure reduces overall cost of IT.
Offers a single place for customers to manage their e-addresses for alerting purposes (email, SMS, fax, voice).
Reduces the time to market for information services.
Ticks the box for shared services use.
Already integrated with Government Gateway, improving your ROI of Gateway investment. It is not compulsory to use Gateway if you just want to use the Alerting capabilities
Meets, and helps you meet EU directives on communications and the Data Protection Act
High availability (typically 99.95% target)
The engine is a hosted service so there are no increases in your IT footprint

The Alerts Engine is very secure, meeting List X requirements, which is unique in this industry and gives the assurance that all data will be kept secured to strict government standards.

We are available to work with all central government departments, local and regional government as well as NHS. We are also happy to work with any pseudo government organisations and agencies.

How can I use the Alerts Engine?

It’s simple. Because the engine is part of the EDT e–Delivery Team shared infrastructure there is no procurement exercise needed. You can simply sign up as part of your existing MOU agreement with EDT or you can sign up quickly with EDT as a new customer.

What can I do with the engine?

The Alerts Engine can provide many benefits for communicating with your customers and staff. Take a look at the below solutions and case studies for examples.

Solutions

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 hospital. 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 hospital = £0.07
Service fee per year = £1,200.00
Cost of missed appointment to hospital = £70
Total number of hospital appointments per year = 20000
Current percentage of missed appointments = 8%
Number of missed appointments per year = 1600 ((e) * (d))
Cost to hospital of missed appointments = £112,000 ((f) * (c))
Cost to send a message to every appointment = £1,400.00 ((a) * (d))
Total cost including service fee = £2,600.00 ((h) + (b))
Number of appointments attended to break even = 37 ((i)) / (c))

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.

A good real-life example of this can be seen in the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust case study later in this document.

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.

I don’t have a portal integration capability can you help?

If you do not want to integrate into the Alerts Engine then we can set up a white label site for you where your customers can come to do their alerting management and subscriptions. An example of this can be seen at https://www.alertsonline.net/VOSA

Case Studies

We currently work with a range of government customers who have adopted the Alerts Engine as part of the Shared Services Common Infrastructure work. Below are a few examples.

HMRC have been utilising the Alerts Engine for over three years now for their Self Assessment alerts. Their users are able to subscribe on the HMRC web site to be alerted of:

Important reminders
A payment being received by HMRC
A payment being made by HMRC

The Self Assessment customer is allowed to select either an email or an SMS for any of the above alerts.

Alerts Online is the strategic alerting solution for Defra. We currently work with many departments, a selection of which are detailed below:

Animal Health

The animal health team use Alerts Online for alerting farmers to new cases of Avian Influenza (bird flu) via direct SMS, allowing them to take swift action and minimise the spread of the disease. With situations like this speed of delivery is critical. The Alerts Engine is capable of sending thousands of messages per minute, making it an ideal and cost effective solution.

A typical send is around 10,000 messages per incident, dependant on the areas of the country needing to be informed. The cost of sending these messages is minimal, and it saves thousands of pounds compared to using call centres to contact the farmers. Also, by the time call centres had managed to get through the list of 10,000 calls the disease may have already been allowed to spread to a wider area.

Whole Farm Approach (WFA)

WFA use Alerts Online to send a variety of messages to their farmers, such as:

Handbook Updates

Sending updates to the handbook electronically (via PDF attached to email) has 3 major benefits; Customers are kept up to date. Far less paper is used and best of all, it's significantly cheaper. Usually these large documents would have to be sent by regular post, which was very costly.

WFA Notifications

Used for sending important updates to customers. Keeps customers up to date and saves the need to post letters by regular mail

Questionnaire submissions

Used to notify customers when they have successfully submitted a questionnaire

WFA chose to integrate the registration and sending of their alerts into their own portal (https://secure.wholefarm.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal), to give their customers a seamless experience. This was done easily by using the set of web services (SOAP interfaces) provided by the Alerts Engine. IBM, who manage the portal for WFA have built Alerts Engine integration into their enterprise business services, making it very easy for any other defra applications to utilise it.

Rural Payments Agency (RPA)

RPA Chose to use the Alerts Engine for contacting their agents in the field with required information. By using the Email to SMS service no setup costs or infrastructure changes were required. They simply send the message as an email to the Alerts Engine, where it is automatically converted and delivered to the agents mobile telephone via SMS.

This has proven an effective method of getting important information to agents with the minimum of disruption or cost.

It is the strategic alerting solution for Defra

Whole Farm

Used for a number of alerts (list them) especially the handbook ones. That will drive savings by avoiding postal costs.

Discuss integration into their portal

They have integrated into their enterprise service bus so that any of the Defra applications can easily utilise the system.

Discuss the poultry alerts (what volumes have been sent out (correct volumes)

Alerts Online is the strategic alerting solution for VOSA

VOSA currently use Alerts Online to provide a number of alerts to their customers. These range from news, to regulatory updates and handbook updates. VOSA chose Alerts online to allow them to operate at a higher level of customer service, and to reduce the costs of customer contact.

To enable themselves to get started in the shortest possible time-frame, and to avoid the costs associated with doing any development work, VOSA opted for our white pages solution. This is a branded version of the Alerts Online web site, providing all the required functionality for alert creation, user registration and alert sending. You can view the VOSA alerting site at http://www.alertsonline.net/vosa. The white pages site is also integrated with Government Gateway, which means that their gateway users can use their same ID to log in.

VOSA are currently looking to expand the number of alerts that they offer, and at other ways that they can use the Alerts Engine. One of the projects being looked at is for using the Alerts Engine for internal communications with staff.

In the current climate, keeping child records secure is a task of great importance. This is why we are pleased that DCSF have chosen to use the a multi factor security system provided by one of our partners, using Alerts Online as the SMS delivery engine.

The system works using a 2 factor pass code. Firstly you have a username, secondly you have a One Time Code (OTC). Now usually, with similar systems the OTC is generated by a small electronic device that you keep on your key ring, or that looks like a calculator (such as those provided by some banks). These devices are very costly to purchase and replace, and you often find that when you need it you don't have it with you.

What makes this system unique is that the OTC is created using your mobile telephone, via SMS. This is how it works:

When a user is registered for the service, an SMS message is sent to their phone containing a randomly generated 10 digit number
When logging in, the OTC is provided by transposing the users PIN with the 10 digit SMS code. E.g:

The user's PIN is 2 4 7 8
The 10 digit SMS code is 9876543210
To find the OTC the user picks the digits from the 10 digit code that correspond with their PIN. In this case digits 2, 4, 7 and 8
This would give an OTC of 8632

Once the user has successfully logged in using this OTC, a new 10 digit code is delivered to their mobile phone via SMS

Because a new 10 digit code is used for every time the user tries to log in its impossible for an attacker to capture a users credentials and replay them, making for a very secure login method. And as the code is delivered to your mobile phone via the Alerts Engine, users don't need to carry any additional equipment.

For more information on how this system can be used to secure your systems, please contact us.

'myguide', an initiative from DCSF, is designed to be an introduction to the web and computers for those requiring a helping hand. As well as various help documents myguide also provides users with a free email account.

The Alerts Engine is used to send a daily SMS notification to each user telling them how many new messages that they have in their inbox. Users are also able to subscribe to the myguide newsletter, which is delivered by email.

This provides a valuable service to people that are just getting used to using computers and email. They may be unlikely to think of checking for messages periodically, so having the SMS reminder when they receive new messages can be a great help.

Alerts Online has been working with Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital for the past 3 years, helping to reduce their ‘do not attends’ for outpatient appointments.

At the time of making an appointment the patient is given the option to provide a mobile phone number or SMS address. A day prior to the appointment the hospital uses this address to send a direct alert to the customer, reminding them of the appointment and at what time it starts. Once sent the address is destroyed, maintaining data protection and privacy policies.

Through this simple process NNUH have managed to reduce their missed appointments by 20%. This has saved them significant amounts of money and helps to reduce waiting lists.

For an example of the sorts of savings that are possible by using appointment reminders to reduce the number of 'do not attends', see the example earlier in this document.

Next Steps

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