TRACKING THE DELIVERY STATUS OF MASS OUTBOUND NOTIFICATIONS

When sending out notifications to multiple recipients it is vital that administrators can track the delivery status of messages in ‘real time’.  Success and more importantly failures, due to a number of factors such as wrong numbers, engaged tone, etc, need to be understood. Appropriate follow-up actions can then be taken such as trying alternative channels or simply creating a list of those who need no further intervention. For a solution provider being able to easily pull all the delivery results together, for a particular notification event or campaign, enables a far slicker operation and means of tracking, monitoring and reporting. 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, and allowing push or pull access to the data.

Our bulk notifications post discusses sending a mass alert to a school where different messages were sent to staff and parents with delivery tracked. This is just one of many examples where there is a need to monitor the status of notification delivery to multiple recipients. Whilst the objectives range from the routine to crisis management the ability to know who received what through what channel can enrich the communication and understanding of the client: have they responded to their invoice payment reminder, have they seen a delivery notification of the school closure guidance or product recall alert.

Having the ability to easily collect results means corrective action can be taken – manually by the administrator or automated (follow-up notifications sent via alternative channels). With Alerting Hub this data can be gleaned in two ways – polled or real-time (event driven)

• Event driven– notification of when something has happened (real time) – we will report on every state change on every call made – delivered to a designated end point such as a web server
• Polled– at any point you can poll for updates on delivery/task completions. To poll you would use the collectevents API call; the example below asks for any progress on any alert, with a maximum of 50 progress events to be returned at a time.

Using the Alerting Hub scheduling subsystem it is very easy to manage automatic escalation of a campaign or alert. One example involves auto chasing of invoices. At the point that an invoice is raised, it is easy to schedule an email reminder for payment if it has not been received after the agreed 30 day period. If there is no response to the email are 35 days, a pre-programmed SMS message is sent. Finally if nothing is heard after 40 days a phone call is made, playing a customisable message to the caller with the option for them to log a response. This escalation – from ignorable emails through to mostly answered phone calls is logged by the Alerting Hub system evidencing the chase process.

Following on from the example given in our bulk notifications blog, where a single invocation of Alerting Hub’s sendalert API was used to send a “School’s closed due to snow” alert. Here we will show how the delivery status across the multiple channels used can be monitored.

Once you’ve initiated the alert using the sendalert API call we’ll respond with some initial information. If all goes well you’ll receive something similar to the example response below:

{
  "success": true,
  "returnCode": 200,
  "alertId": "9ab246a9-7b22-4eed-aaca-7fc21bf05ce7",
  "clientRef": "snowalert",
  "alerts": [
    {
      "alertType": "sms",
      "tag": "parent_sms",
      "success": true,
      "sentCount": 5,
      "requestedCount": 5,
      "remainingCapacity": 95
    },
    {
      "alertType": "sms",
      "tag": "teacher_sms",
      "success": true,
      "sentCount": 3,
      "requestedCount": 3,
      "remainingCapacity": 92
    },
    {
      "alertType": "email",
      "tag": "teacher_email",
      "success": true,
      "sentCount": 3,
      "requestedCount": 3,
      "remainingCapacity": 497
    },
    {
      "alertType": "call",
      "tag": "teacher_call",
      "success": true,
      "sentCount": 4,
      "requestedCount": 4,
      "remainingCapacity": 862
    }
  ],
  "emailRefId": "0409_09172254"
}