This blog post will be the first of a short series taking a look at the modules inside of DECK. We hope to get your creative juices flowing on what the module might help with in your business.
DECK is a base web application which Spieker Point built to speed development and reduce cost for its customers. DECK allows us to build custom components on top of it – quickly creating something customized and directly usable for your business. It has all of the typical web application components built into it out of the box (user login and security; subsystems for reporting, dash boards, KPI’s, etc).
But where DECK is different, where the value proposition lies, are in the three major modules inside of it. This week we’re going to look at the messaging system in it.
DECK has a sophisticated messaging engine built into it. It allows users to communicate through 4 different “bands”:
- In tool. Messages can be securely exchanged between users of the software. The application can let a user know that there is a message waiting for them, and when they log in the messages appear on the users dashboard.
- Email. Email can be sent from the application to users or from a user into the application from outside. Depending on what we’re building on top of DECK for our customer, this opens all kinds of possibilities into sustainable email communications.
- Text. SMS (Text) is built into the system. For example, if the software spots something important (an emerging trend, an urgent message to a user, a changed password, or several failed login attempts), the software can send a text to the user notifying them there is something important going on.
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR). This is the computerized voice generated call made to a phone number. You might want your users to be called by the software in certain cases, or you might want the user to be able to call into the software through this facility.
You have to let your imagination run wild to understand the implications of this for your needs. Let’s go through some examples together.
Perhaps you’re a doctors office and deal with patient appointments. You want the software to remind a patient before an upcoming appointment (perhaps the day before). You can use DECK to record the patient’s preferences in how they’d like to be communicated with. Preferences for Boomers might be for a phone call from the IVR system. This can go far enough to have them press a key to indicate they’re still able to make the appointment; the software can then go as far as doing something with the response. Gen X and Gen Y patients might prefer to have email notifications, while Gen Z might want reminders via text messages.
Perhaps you’re a school and you want the software to automatically communicate with a parent and let them know that their child is not in school today and there hasn’t been communication from the parent on the absence. Based on the parent’s preferences, this might be through email, text or IVR (or all of the above).
A post-secondary school might use the messaging system for emergencies. Sending all students and facility updates via text of a shooter in the school. “Stay away from the math building” or “Emergency situation is over – please gather in the quad for a briefing”.
A municipality might issue a “boil water advisory” and have the IVR system phone all of the people in the community at the start and again at the end of the emergency.
An electrical services company may need 5 people to help with a power outage at a customer site. But of the 100 employees, only 30 of them have the skills needed to help in this situation. A callout campaign to those skilled staff can be started in the software; when the first 5 respond that they’re able to attend, the callout is stopped. A real-time display of who is coming and who has been called can be displayed for a manager and the team.
A sales organization can have DECK watch an email address. When a sales rep sends an email to a customer, they blind carbon copy (BCC) the email address. DECK receives the email and files it under the customer’s profile – perhaps creating a new profile if one doesn’t already exist, and creating a task for the sales rep, on their dashboard, to complete the contact info for the new customer.
Conclusion
Proper communication to employees and customers may be the most important thing for a business to tackle. DECK gives you the ability to cost effectively stay ahead of it. With all of this built into DECK, the question becomes “how can your business benefit?”