Client Industry - Not for Profit

As one of the world's largest overseas aid agencies, this not-for-profit organisation depends upon and accepts public support by ongoing donation and/or sponsorship. An ongoing issue has been some credit card payment details either being incorrectly supplied or having expired before being processed.

Client requirement

Realising that making outbound calls from their internal call centre was cost prohibitive, the client wanted to trial SMS as a means of communicating with these supporters in order to obtain current and correct payment information.

As the financial pledges made by supporters were unable to be processed until correct details had been obtained, it was critical that any SMS service was able to be set up, and the first messages sent out, within 24 hours from the campaign being approved.

As these customers were to be given priority in the call queue when responding to their call centre, the solution needed to be able to stagger each SMS broadcast so as not to exceed call centre service levels.

DCA's solution

DCA proposed an SMS merge broadcast solution offering a scheduling facility - thereby allowing each of the lists to be prepared and sent out at pre-arranged times and maximising the call centre staff dedicated to receiving the calls.

The system proposed by DCA was also able to merge supporter specific personalised data (supporter name and unique ID number) into the message with a dedicated 1800 number for responding. The ability to personalise each message was preferred by the client over other vendor solutions as the supporter was able to be quickly and easily identified when responding.

During the campaign DCA configured its SMS software to also receive opt-outs and return SMS texts as an email message, which were forwarded directly onto client for actioning.

Customer benefits

As a non-profit organisation, ROI is critical. The DCA SMS solution proved to be extremely cost effective - a viable alternative to outbound calling - with a significantly higher ROI for the client than other communication methods.

"The positives for us were having a supporter calling in with their supporter number ready and being able to stagger calls to coincide with shifts in customer service, getting an instant response and fixing the problem quickly."

Contact details

For further details about DCA's SMS services, please contact: