TRACKING RESULTS OF
UNIFIED ALERTING: PART 2

There is growing demand for mass notification systems – whether for marketing, parental engagement, invoice chasing or emergency situations – to support two-way messaging. It is not enough to know that a message was successfully delivered; there is, in addition, a valid need to demand acknowledgment of receipt, or to understand actions taken following receipt of a notification.

Being able to collate this information allows clients to make informed decision. It could be as simple as tweaking an invoice chasing SMS message to encourage more clicks through to payment pages or could mean first responders are aware of which employees haven’t responded to a public safety alert in their building and are at risk.

Alerting Hub simplifies the whole process by collating replies to an alert based on a single alert-id regardless of the communication channel used – SMS, email, or Voice.

Whilst the objective for enabling and tracking responses to messages may vary greatly from solution to solution, they all allow informed follow-up activity – who hasn’t clicked through to pay their invoice? Which parents haven’t acknowledged a request for a child to isolate at home? How many clients clicked through to gain further guidance on a product recall alert? Who clicked through to a product promotion but didn’t buy?

By default SMS enables two-way messaging, but SMS notifications have developed way beyond the simple sending of an arbitrary 140 character message. Today you can send longer messages (known as multi-part) which are concatenated 140 character blocks, embed links and phone numbers and change the Sender ID to your company or client name to boost trust in source. However the latter brings certain complications. Where a sender ID has been modified the recipient no longer has a number to send a ‘reply’ to.

Depending on whether you stick with a reply number or change to a ‘no-reply’ sender ID, with Alerting Hub you have the ability to track who opened and responded or took a desired action. With the latter not only can you embed a link to a landing page but a unique trackable link, so that you know exactly who has clicked through, from which notification.

When you think of a phone-call, for many that equates to a real-time, two way mode of communication – instant feedback is provided.  However with voice notifications, typically a voice message is being played to the callee, so you have to enable and track a response another way.  It is possible to use a system such as CNAM such that a company name is automatically presented to the callee.  Usually (although not exclusively) the number presented is routed back to the platform which generated the call. This provides the ability for the callee to call back if necessary and either leave feedback or receive more detailed information.

Another feedback route is to prompt callees to hit any key to confirm they have heard the message. A slightly more sophisticated solution is to provide a simple IVR menu, which presents callees with options such as: “Press 1 if you are safe; Press 2 if you are in need of assistance; Press 3 to speaker to a first responder”.  Whichever option you choose the unique event-ID makes it easy to see who has or hasn’t responded and how.

Similar to SMS and voice, with email you have the choice of providing a reply email address or a no-reply address. In those instances where the sender ID has been modified and is a ‘no-reply’ address it is still possible to track if a recipient has engaged with any embedded links within the email itself, or potentially to embed an ‘image’ that you can track the loading of.

When sending bulk SMS and emails you can include notification content that is unique to each recipient. This is achieved by replacing some or all of the original message; known as performing ‘lookups’. Items such as recipient telephone number (or email address), current date and time and sending number or email address can be specified.

Lookups are specified using the “lookups” JSON section with the relevant alert section in /sendalert as shown in the example below.

When the use of a ‘shortlink’ is specified, a unique (per-recipient) small url is placed in the SMS or email, allowing the recipient to ‘click’ on that link when they receive the message. The link will take them back via Alerting Hub for collection of information such as browser, Operating System type, recipient number, email address and so on. If you specify an onward url as part of the sendalert then Alerting Hub will automatically forward the recipients ‘click’ to your url, together with pertinent information about the recipient. If you do not specify an onward url the recipient will simply see an Alerting Hub ‘thank-you’ landing page.

{
  "version" : "latest",
  "apiKey" : "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", 
  "clientRef" : "my-reference",
  "options": {
    "notification" : "poll",
    "notificationType" : "json"
  }
  "alert" : [ 
    {
        "alertType" : "sms",
        "tag" : "tag1",
        "recipientList" : "+447777100100,+447777100101,+447777100102",
        "content" : "This is message for {recipient} on {datetime-DD/MM/YYYY}. Click {shortlink} to let us know you've seen this.",
        "contentEncoding" : "utf8",
        "sender" : "My Company",
        "lookups": { 
            "performLookups": true, 
            "uniqueLookups": true, 
            "shortlink": { 
                "reference": "a-reference", 
                "url": "https://my-companies-url.com/alertinghub-click-through"
            }
        }
    }
  ]
}

Every event or campaign is assigned an ID. Consequently every notification sent, regardless of channel has that event ID associated with it. Unlike other platforms, this enables Alerting Hub to easily tie any responses/results to a single API call.