London-based School of Music – an SMS solution Case Study

Early adopters of business SMS – Good communication is key

Clear and timely communications are essential to any organisation, but especially vital in the high pressure world of performance. An example of this would be a Concerts Team who have the responsibility of making sure people receive the correct information in a timely way, the right people are in the right place and last minute sickness or absences are covered in time for a performance.

Emailing and calling people to let them know about any changes was not ideal. Often the messages were not picked up until it was too late. That is why the School’s IT department opted for an SMS solution that would facilitate information blasts and on-the-fly messaging, delivering messages to recipients in seconds and in a way that was easy for them to receive and reply too.

The success of this cost effective communications channel has resulted in the School being a Text Message Server user (our on-premise solution) for almost a decade.

Office 365 prompts migration to cloud based SMS offering

Following a recent migration to Office 365, additional complexities had to be introduced to the configuration of the Music Schools on-prem SMS solution, Text Message Server, causing the use of the SMS service to drop off. It therefore became important to find a solution that would happily sit alongside the new IT systems and bring back the agility and usability that made SMS so useful for them.

The obvious choice was to migrate to ProcessFlows’ highly interoperable and scalable SMS cloud offering, 123-txt. The cloud based nature of the solution facilitates seamless access from any device whilst also offering the ability to integrate into existing IT infrastructure through the use of an extensive set of APIs. This meant 123-txt was able to meet all of the Schools SMS needs, whilst also introducing a number of additional benefits.

Accessible anywhere, anytime – One of the obvious benefits created by the cloud based nature of 123-txt is that the platform is accessible from any device and at all times. This provides users with the flexibility to utilise the SMS tools available to them even when they are out and about.

Meets disaster recovery and business continuity comms requirements – Another benefit is that as a cloud solution, 123-txt can be utilised in the vital communications role when forming disaster recovery and business continuity plans. The platform is such that info blasts and alerts can be configured to be sent out at a moment’s notice, or automated entirely, meaning that in the case of an incident, employees and other relevant individuals can be immediately notified.

Improved organisation through Shared Numbers and Credit Pools – 123-txt has also made it easy for users to be grouped into departments and then be assigned credits and numbers. As well as keeping on top of usage, having specific numbers associated to teams has allowed communications to become consistent with particular numbers being used for particular communication purposes.

Cost saving – Finally, with 123-txt’s straightforward pricing where you only pay the messages sent through the system, SMS represents unbeatable value for money.