When a product you market gets taken away how do you find a substitute? Working my way through how to solve an issue and find success.
The problem that left me high and dry
I run a message service for business which includes many subsidiary products relating around the core offering.
One product was an SMS escalation service that worked its way through a group of support people. In turn, each would be sent an SMS message until one responded to the alert and pressed a stop feature.
This is an ideal support service, for factory issues or anywhere that an action must be accepted.
Examples are IT support where urgent support calls are requested and someone must take responsibility for the issue.
Another was after-hours legal issues because a legal response was required urgently. When you are in the lockup and need help and only have that one phone call. We have all seen it at the movies however it does happen in real life as well.
There are many more that embrace this requirement however the escalation service had come to an end being a low volume and high maintenance product.
Finding a solution in a hurry
My carrier had neglected to tell me of the intended demise and only on my inquiry were we alerted. So it was all fingers out to find a new solution.
The business environment is now dominated by Internet services so this is where we started our search. Many companies do SMS so that was not an issue however we needed to find one that would recognise the problem and act on a solution.
In most cases, we front end the situation with a control centre that takes the problem and sets up an escalation and message delivery.
We supply either a 1300 style number for in-country access or a local number for international access because you can not access 1300 numbers from out of the country. Both numbers may be employed in one service where necessary.
The service receives the caller requirement and emails the request to the on-call personal. That has an attached SMS that asks for a response. If the job is not accepted the message goes to the next in the roster etc. Delays can be in any period usually set at about 10 minutes.
How to solve an issue with automation.
Automation takes away human error
We all understand telephone tag, calls on hold, inept operators and the many foibles of voice services. All that is taken away with a system that is set to act in the manner you want and not one that suits the requirements of others.
Verdi business messaging is a fully automated service where calls are taken either directly or on no-answer or line busy. Messages are recorded and emailed to one or more recipients. An SMS is sent to trigger an escalation service using an international solution, based on support software.
The set up of the service was placed in the hands of experts in call handling procedures and took several weeks and a lot of research to complete.
The resulting product has set an industry-standard in business solutions.
Conclusion
The internet provides opportunities that were once just dreams. Just about anything can be achieved with some ingenuity and support from available software solutions. To help solve an issue we drew on the best available solutions and integrated them into our service.
Finally we found that we lost a very good service and replaced it with an even better solution that will continue to support the needs of business in Australia.
Telephone messaging and support escalation by Peter Hanley
