SMS your way to success
by Andrew Grill, General Manager,
Products and Services, LegionONE.
SMS your way to success
by Andrew Grill, General Manager,
Products and Services, LegionONE.
First
published by mybusiness magazine June 2004
LegionONE is the business unit of Legion Interactive and have been responsible for interactive SMS campaigns such as Big Brother, Australian Idol, and delivering Year 12 School results in NSW and Victoria via SMS. In addition, LegionONE provide a range of corporate messaging solutions utilising SMS, voice and the web.
The success of TV shows like Australian Idol have confirmed Australia’s love for technology. Idol was Australia’s largest interactive television event to date and opened up the possibilities of SMS messaging to a wider audience.
The very fact that you could ‘vote’ using your mobile phone has captured the imagination of Australian businesses and revealed how they can use SMS technology to run their operations more efficiently.
According to statistics released late last year by the Australian Communications Authority, Australia’s mobile telecommunications market has experienced a 44% increase in the use of SMS messages compared to 2002. The study also showed that in 2003, 40% of small businesses reported using SMS – a 10% increase from the previous year.
Jupiter research suggests that messages sent via SMS in Australia will increase from 4 billion in 2003 to 9 billion in 2008 with the business community being a major driver of this activity.
Many businesses are now realising the inherent business benefits of messaging with SMS, and are finding new ways to utilise the technology to increase productivity, reduce messaging costs and become more responsive to clients and suppliers.
For months now, SMS has been mentioned in almost every medium and in applications and ways that were never thought possible. Have you ever wondered to yourself how you could harness the power of SMS for your business?
With nearly 15 million mobile phones in Australia, and almost every one of them able to send and receive messages, SMS is becoming the ‘new email’ for business communications, according to Andrew Grill, General Manager, Products and Services for messaging provider LegionONE.
As recent as five years ago, many small businesses had not yet latched onto the power of electronic communication such as email for contact with staff, clients and suppliers. Now that the adoption of mobile phone technology is so widespread in Australia, SMS is becoming the breakthrough technology for targeted business communications.
The cost savings by utilising SMS are one of the main benefits.
Many small businesses may not be aware that it costs around 37 cents for a ‘flag fall’ cost each time you call a mobile from a home or business phone. Coupled with the costs of the call itself, voicemail deposits and retrievals, a simple message from a client to your phone’s voicemail box could end up costing over $3.00. With SMS, a short message could cost as little as 22 cents.
There are a multitude of uses for SMS, now that the technology is available on desktops, without having to tap out a message from the tiny phone ‘keyboard’.
Among the many applications for SMS in the Business environment, temporary office workers are now starting to receive their assignments via SMS, with all of the details sent in the one message, removing the need to dictate over the phone and waste valuable time.
With the new SPAM Act now in place, which also applies to SMS, companies need to be familiar with what they can and cannot do with regards to sending messages to their clients. The SPAM Act has some positive benefits, as it allows you to ask your clients what their preferred method of communication is (eg phone, email, letter, SMS) and obtain their express permission to communicate with them in this way. Responsible marketers will always ensure that they have their client's permission to send marketing messages. Companies should also be aware that as SMS is now so portable, and many people have their phones with them at all times, messages outside business hours and on weekends should be avoided.
SMS is actually saving companies money in their dealings with clients because they can provide all of the information in a single message, for less than the cost of a local phone call, and not have to bother with voicemail and unreturned calls.
In many ways, SMS is becoming the “new email” as messages can find their way straight into the hands of a particular person, no matter where they are, rather than having to wait for them to come back to their computer, switch on, log in and connect to the internet.
Not only is SMS for business a smart option, those not already using it are missing out on a valuable time and cost saving business tool.
Case studies
Busy Bookkeeping
Busy Bookkeeping are a growing national bookkeeping franchise and have been using SMS for contacting their own franchisees with leads that come in to their national 1300 number, as well as sending business activity statement reminders to their clients. Before they utilised SMS, Busy Bookkeeping were spending valuable time calling their clients to remind them to submit their BAS statements, only to find they were unavailable or their phone was switched off, meaning messages had to be left, and follow up phone calls made. With SMS, a friendly reminder can be broadcast to all clients at the same time. Clients such as Busy Bookkeeping are finding that SMS has a much higher cut-through than email or voicemail, with clients that were previously unavailable calling back a short time after the sms was received! With SMS, Busy Bookkeeping are able to function more efficiently and effectively.
Ray White Elsternwick
Real Estate agencies that manage properties on behalf of clients will tell you that the monthly rent roll can become expensive to manage if clients forget to pay their rent and need to be reminded every month. Ray White Elsternwick in Victoria are utilising the power of SMS to broadcast a message to all clients that are behind in their rent, and are finding that this has significantly improved their rent collection. Follow up phone calls and stories as to why the rent is late have become a thing of the past, and as the SMS messages actually cost less than a local phone call, Ray White are able to significantly reduce their telecommunication costs by using SMS. SMS messaging is also being utilises for auction day reminders, as well as for communicating with Sales Agents out in the field, advising them of sales leads instantly on their mobile in a discrete way, while they are busy speaking to existing clients.
Transfield Services
Transfield services were looking for a cost effective way to recruit skilled workers for refinery shutdowns that occur about 7 times each year. Their existing method was to advertise in the newspaper or utilise an online recruitment service. They were finding that 70% of the people responding to the advertisements were already listed on their system as they had worked for Transfield previously. The major cost for recruiting 100+ workers for an extended period is the time taken to contact over 200 people to see if they are available to work. For a refinery shutdown scheduled for February 2004, Transfield used SMS to send a broadcast message to 230 people who had worked for the company on previous shutdowns. Within 5 minutes of the SMS message being sent, over 30 replies were received, and by the end of the day, over 100 skilled workers had indicated they were available to work. This literally saved over 4 weeks of phone calls and call-backs and took less than four hours.
10 things SMS can do for you
More information on LegionONE is available by calling 1800 99 22 12 or visiting www.legionone.com