Kind Regards, Scott

We’ve automated our viewing appointment system with outbound SMS to landlords and property managers. We ask if they can show tenants around a property at some given time to which they reply CONFIRM or CANCEL. Our inbound system then updates our calender and keeps all parties involved up-to-date.

We’ve also had fantastic results curbing “no shows” by sending out reminders 2 hours before each appointment. Customer satisfaction has been improved by increasing the level of contact we have with each of our clients. Simple stuff like txting landlords to let them know when their property is put on RightMove, Zoopla, FindAProperty, etc makes the work we do for them behind the scenes a lot more visible, something we’d been criticized for in the past.

Using TXTLocal we’ve cut costs and increased volumes to a point where we can now offer a free rental property advertising service to landlords who don’t mind taking viewings themselves and agree to let us make our commission by just doing a credit check on tenants before they move in (for which the tenant pays).

How long did it all take?? A:Less than a week – the API is really that easy you can get going right away.

Comments / Patches are welcome! https://github.com/epigenesys/txtlocal

Send myself a message when someone joins my service/order product
Send myself a message when someone changes an important detail on their account

So its not just usefull for keeping customers informed…

Thanks for your contribution!
- The Txtlocal web team

All we do is input a csv file and the SMS messages are scheduled to the time we want.

The SMS messages are personalised with the child’s name and a unique appointment time, but it means we dont have to manually enter the message each time!

Please keep us up to date with your developments on this project – it’s a perfect example of how to use our two-way API to communicate with customers.

Thanks!
- The Txtlocal web team

Initially we are going to trial sending SMS messages for certain events, for example:

- when an order is received by the delivery company and stock is expected into the warehouse a message will be triggered automatically to be sent during sensible daytime hours (8am – 8pm). Messages sent outside these hours will be queued until 8am the following morning. Customers have often waited weeks for their product to come into stock, so are anxious to receive any news of their order. This will hopefully reduce the number of speculative ‘when can I expect my delivery’ incoming calls.

- reminder messages sent the day before delivery, sent in bulk by delivery route. This should reduce the number of failed deliveries (no-one homes), reducing the number of redelivery attempts and therefore cutting warehousing, vehicle, fuel and staff costs.

- when the call center staff call to confirm delivery dates any ‘no answers’ will trigger text messages asking the customer to call back to arrange delivery. This will vastly increase the productivity of the call center operatives by reducing the quantity of ‘no answers’ or answering machine calls and should help confirm deliveries faster.

- other adhoc messages, such as messages to vehicles in-cab mobile phones alerting drivers to road closures or other issues. Particularly important during icy weather when roads local to depots become unsuitable for HGV’s.

This will all be tightly integrated into the organisations web-based ERP system and the system will allow customisation based upon which client they are delivering on behalf of (so that the sender name is the retailers name which will be instantly recognisable by the customer).

In the future we will be looking towards automatically processing incoming messages, e.g. ‘Are you available to take delivery on Monday, 3rd December? Reply with YES to confirm this delivery date’. Again, this should reduce the amount of administration work and other associated costs.

You might think this may take some time to develop, however after a few days developing I’m pretty much done, ready to start testing early next week. Integration with the web services is pretty easy, although ASP.NET web services would have been more useful for integration, rather than having to craft HTTP POST requests.