iFactor Consulting

Companies have been making an effort to automate customer service for many years. Two obstacles exist that can delay customer actions, both resulting in a negative customer service experience.  The first obstacle is the customer’s inability to take action immediately. For example, a service provider may initialize a “payment past due” alert to users via phone or email.  Most users aren’t able to take a personal call or check personal email during working hours. Customers then have to call back or respond to the email after work. A similar problem occurs with email since in most cases machine generated emails do not support 2 way processing for replies due to content complexities and security concerns.

The second obstacle is that once a user responds to the service provider by calling back or logging into the service provider’s website, it takes a considerable amount of time to accomplish the necessary tasks to close the issue.  When using a website, the customer must spend time reviewing options, navigating the site, and either entering or confirming pertinent information.  A phone call is even more time consuming for both the customer and the company.  The customer must explain to an agent why he or she is calling, and the agent must locate the appropriate record and possible resolutions within their system.  An IVR may remove this workload for the company, but does nothing to improve time required on the customer’s part, often resulting in a negative response towards the company.

Assuming that phone calls and emails initiated by a service provider are machine generated, the first obstacle (not taking action immediately) is caused by “one way” communication. (A phone call becomes one way communication when the receiving party is not available to take the call.)  The second obstacle (time required to complete the communication) is caused by “sessionless” and “delayed” communication. In other words, the session that has triggered the machine to generate the alert can’t be easily retrieved when a user responds to the initial contact from the system.

iFactor’s Notifi product with its SMS interface allows users to “act now” and always keep the correct “session” for user/machine communication via two way text communication.  Here is an example of a use case utilizing this SMS interface:  a utility company’s accounting system generates a payment past due alert via iFactor’s SMS interface. The user reads the text message when he/she becomes available, which may be immediately or a few hours later. She then replies to the text with “Y”, and the system charges the user’s credit card or bank account on record. Note that because iFactor’s SMS interface supports sessions for two way communications, it knows the meaning of text message “Y” from this particular user at this particular time. (“Y” could mean “confirm outage” in a different SMS text communication, or a variety of other things, depending on the initial contact.)

Notifi is the only software product focused on enabling SMS for use on a complete set of utility transactions, including billing and payments, outage communications, work management, and energy management. By providing an off the shelf solution for the SMS channel, Notifi allows utilities to quickly enable this channel for their customers, driving customer service and direct costs savings. Notifi and SMS also allow utilities to build customer connections using the existing customer investment in mobile devices, reducing costs compared to providing dedicated in home displays and consoles which still fail to reach the customer for critical transactions.