Overview

Alerts Online is provided to Government as a shared, cross-government service. Alerts Online forms part of the strategic, government-shared infrastructure helping to drive transformation, customer centricity and efficiency savings.

Alerts Online provides a number of benefits for government and the customer (citizens and business):

Ticks all the boxes in the Government ICT Strategy.
Shared infrastructure reduces overall cost of IT.
Offers a single place for customers to manage their e-addresses for alerting purposes (email, SMS, fax).
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.

Alerts Online is very secure. We meet List X requirements, which is unique in this industry, and gives the assurance that all data will be kept secure 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 other government organisations, such as NDPBs and Agencies.

How can I use Alerts Online?

It's simple. Because Alerts Online is a cross-government shared service (already procured), there is no procurement exercise needed. You can simply sign up as part of your existing MOU agreement with DWP, or you can sign up quickly with DWP as a new customer.

What can I do with the Alerts Online?

Alerts Online can provide many benefits for communicating with your customers and staff. You can find examples at the below solutions and case studies.

Solutions

I need to reduce 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. Many of these calls will be triggered by customers chasing the progress of forms (say a benefits application) and processes, ringing in with following questions:

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 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 (email, SMS, fax). It requires little or no technology change at your end as we can provide the simple tools to drive this process (you can also integrate it).

The savings are clear:

If you are getting 100,000 application forms in per month and 20% of recipients call your call centre at £10 per call, it is costing you £200,000 per month.
With Alerts Online, you could send out 2 SMS messages per customer, e.g. 'We have received your form and we will process it by X date' plus 'We have processed your form and you have been successful; your money will be paid by Y date'. Your savings, based upon a 30% reduction in those call types, would be around £50,000 per month. (This is after all costs of SMS.) Significant savings 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 at least by 20%.

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

Cost of Alerts Online messages to hospital = £0.05
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 = £1,000.00 ((a) * (d))
Total cost including service fee = £2,200.00 ((h) + (b))
Number of appointments attended to break even = 32 ((i)) / (c))

As can be seen from the figures above, only 32 appointments need be attended or cancelled and reassigned in order to break even. Using this simple method to remind customers can lead to huge savings. It also 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 of doctor’s appointments;
Remind of visits by social workers.

Anywhere that lost appointments cost your organisation money, Alerts Online 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 need to make significant savings in the next spending review (CSR).

Alerts Online can help you realise massive savings. You could switch off outbound post and make all outbound communications to your customers electronic. For example, HMRC has 5 million online self-assessment users. Each customer is currently sent 3 pieces of post per year, costing HMRC around £45 million. Using our secure mail system they could send these electronically and save over £44.5 million per year (based on each piece of standard post costing £3 in total costs and each secure email costing only 2p).

I want to remind my customers of their obligations.

Regulatory burden is one of the key problems every organisation has to face. The transformational Government work is encouraging reductions in the regulatory burden where possible. Alerts Online can help with this problem. When your customers have obligations, it is a simple courtesy to send them a reminder ahead of the deadline. In many cases, this results in a more compliant customer base and less chasing and fine processing.

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 Alerts Online 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 also be claimed on top of being more effective. You can even 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 very popular channel: it's estimated that there are two mobile phones for every person in the UK.
By using Alerts Online 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 it 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 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.

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. 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 (from say Yahoo to Google), their email address changes. The original email address, and 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 are trading funds and 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 revenue 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 (such as training material or health and safety material), you can charge the customer a pre-agreed price to receive the information. This can be any attachment to an email (straightforward PDF 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 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 these monetary costs there is also the cost to the environment 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 would be pleased to work with you to make improvements in efficiency, customer service and environmental issues. We can work with you to send information in electronic formats, which will produce significant savings:

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

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

If you do not want to integrate into Alerts Online, we can set up a White Label site for you where your customers can come to do their alerting management and subscriptions. A White Label site is a fully functioning version of the Alerts Online website, with your own branding and colour scheme. All the hosting and set-up is done by us and you could be up and running within a few hours.

An example of this can be seen at http://vosa.alertsonline.net, which is an Alerts Online White Label site for VOSA.

Case Studies

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

HMRC worked with Alerts Online for over three years for their Self Assessment alerts, enabling their users to subscribe on the HMRC website 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. Alerts Online 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, dependent 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 Online.

IBM, who manage the portal for WFA, have built Alerts Online integration into their enterprise business services, making it very easy for any other Defra applications to utilise.

Rural Payments Agency (RPA)

RPA chose to use Alerts Online 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 Alerts Online, where it is automatically converted and delivered to the agent's mobile phone via SMS.

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

Alerts Online is the strategic alerting solution for VOSA.

VOSA currently use Alerts Online to provide several kinds 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.

VOSA opted for our White Label solution as they wanted to be able to start straight away and to avoid the costs associated with doing any development work. This is a branded version of the Alerts Online website, providing all the required functionality for alert creation, user registration and alert sending. You can view the VOSA alerting site at http://vosa.alertsonline.net. The White Label site is also integrated with Government Gateway, which means that their gateway users can use the same ID to log in.

VOSA are currently looking to expand the range of alerts that they offer. They are also planning to use Alerts Online 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, a SMS message is sent to their phone containing a randomly generated 10-digit number.
When logging in, the OTC is provided by transposing the user’s 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, it is impossible for an attacker to capture the user’s credentials and replay them, making for a very secure login method. And as the code is delivered to your mobile phone via the Alerts Online, users do not 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. As well as various help documents, myguide also provides users with a free email account.

Alerts Online is used to send a daily SMS notification to each user telling them how many new messages 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 who are just getting used to using computers and email. They may be unlikely to think of checking for messages regularly, 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 three years, helping to reduce their ‘no shows' 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. This way we make sure that maintaining data protection and privacy policies are maintained.

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

For an example of savings that are possible by using appointment reminders to reduce the number of 'no shows' see the example earlier in this document.

The Apprenticeship Vacancy Matching Service (AVMS), an inititive of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), use Alerts Online to keep their users up to date on current apprenticeship vacancies matching their skills.

Anybody seeking an apprenticeship can enter their requirements into the AVMS system as a 'saved search'. Each day the AVMS service checks their saved search against all new apprenticeship vacancies. If a match is found, the user is notified by either SMS text message or email, allowing them to submit an application before the position is filled.

AVMS chose to integrate Alerts Online into their portal using the Alerts Online web services (SOAP interfaces). This gives their users a seamless integration with the alerting functions.

Next Steps

If you would like to discuss how Alerts Online can be utilised in your department, please use the Contact Us page on this web site, or email us at info@alertsonline.net.

Version 01, 16.07.2010.