The March of Progress

Two years ago, offering tenants the ability to send a text to the Customer Service inbox offered greater choice and was a step forward for many Housing Associations. A gateway offered an additional means of communication but with little business benefit and many gateways were seldom ever used by the tenants.

Mobile technology, however, remains one of the most innovative technology areas and with products such as Deeplake CMGR, SMS text can now offer real business benefits, but based on "SMS Platforms" and not simple "SMS Gateways".

What is a "SMS Gateway"?

The typical SMS gateway is a box of electronics containing one or more mobile telephone "sims". Used in conjunction with a simple software utility a gateway allows a network connected PC to send and receive SMS text. The SMS gateway may sit on your local network or be hosted by a provider.

Each sim typically has a unique mobile number, just like a mobile phone, and you can send a text to a tenant via email or from a web page, usually typing in the mobile number or importing an extract from another system.

What is the SMS Platform?

The SMS Platform is much more sophisticated middleware software platform that contains one or more SMS gateways hidden within the infrastructure, but offers full integration with Hosuing Applications, management tools, and a range of out-of-the-box features for Housing such as Lone Working, Self Service Rent Balance Equiries, Survey modules and much more.

SMS Platforms contain user and content security and anti-SPAM functions plus sophisticated auditing, budgetting and management tools.

Costs for SMS platforms are slightly higher in the short term, but functionality is 50x to 100x higher and offers a "strategic approach" to text deployment. ROI for an SMS Platform is typically between one and three months. A SMS gateway may have no ROI at all.

SMS Gateway or SMS Platform?

Put simply, because Gateways do not address all the problems or harness the potential benefits of SMS they are generally considered a short term solution, typically used where budgets are an issue. And although installing a SMS gateway gives a "tick the box" and allows simple communication with tenants using SMS, few of the potential benefits of SMS text areavailable.

We estimate from research carried out with the National Housing Federation that an SMS platform can reduce communication costs, whereas an SMS Gateway installation is broadly cost-neutral.

A 9 month Deeplake and National Housing Federation research project into communication with Tenants showed that £200 per tenant per annum could be saved by moving written and telephone communication to SMS text and email. In addition, service levels could improve and many Inspection Areas enhanced.

Best Practice is constantly developing, and CMGR was developed from this research to meet these objectives. We estimate that CMGR represents more than 100x the sophistication and benefits of a typical SMS gateway system.

Priorities for department heads in Housing today include:

• Choice (allowing tenants to choose how and when they communicate with you)
• Diversity (enabling communication with differing language and disability groups)
• Environment (acting responsibly in the use of natural resources - such as paper and consumables)
• Efficiency (handling more work with fewer resources)
• Participation (involving tenants in how services are provided and demonstrably gaining representative and timely tenant feedback)

Deeplake's CMGR addresses these priorities with functions such as self service rent balances, SMS notice boards, sophisticated conferencing, integration with existing Housing Management Systems and many other features.

In addition, the use of SMS poses the challenges of:

• Cost Control (budgetting and monitoring use by department, tenant and user)
• Auditing (secure logging of communication for reference and Data Proection)
• SPAM Protection and Prevention (rate limiting and prioritisation of SMS messages)
• Integration into Multiple Applications including HMS (use Outlook Contacts or your HMS for tenant details)
• Multi-Lingual Processing (send and receive in the tenants preferred language - automatically)
• Workflow Integration (link multiple messages and replies into a seamless workflow - complete processes without staff intervention)

Deeplake takes an application approach to the use of SMS, offering sophisticated application functionality to allow the full power of SMS to work for your organisation.