Many telephone calls have been found to be able to communicate equally or more efficient using Short Messaging Service (SMS). While the cost is a major issue, phone calls also consume much resource, and in some cases when the other party is not available, objective may not even met. There is no surprise of the increasing trend in SMS usage, simply because it is a better way and clearer way of communication in certain cases.

Speed SMS has been built with the same objective in mind: clear, effective and efficient communication. Corporate using Speed SMS auto send out reminders to the recipient to remind of their appointment , SMS to remind on outstanding payment, SMS to auto reply to customers the current wait time in the hospital/bank etc., SMS to remind subscription renewal, SMS to inform the fans of the match result and all kind of usage. The benefit is great with the implementation of Auto SMS in many organizations:

- The turn up rate is much higher, and more on time turn up with the   appointment reminder.
- Shorter time to payment for outstanding invoices.
- Better queue management as customer does not turn up at the   same time
- Higher renewal rate with auto reminder

Many other benefits to be listed, but most importantly the business overhead is greatly reduces with the substitute of expensive human operators with the affordable SMS charges.

Right Audience
With the Data Warehouse and OLAP engine, Speed SMS can rely on fast and easy queries to extract the matching records to send the SMS automatically.

Unicode Templates
Speed SMS supports multi-languages, multiple templates to enable customers of different preference and different categories to receive different messages in their own preferred language.

Business Activity Monitoring and Alerts
Speed SMS can be used for send out alerts in the activity monitoring or other processes. As part of Speedminer Suite, Speed SMS can be triggered from any other modules within the system.

Application Programming Interface
Speed SMS provide API for external system communication to send out SMS.

Automated Escalation
Speed SMS submits critical alerts via SMS to so-called escalation chains. According to a configurable order users get notified on their mobile phone. Speed SMS monitors delivery receipts and replies. If a delivery confirmation or reply is not received in time the next person in the chains gets a SMS. All fully automated.

Audit Trail and Archive
SMS that has been sent out successfully or failed are all stored in the Data Warehouse for audit trail, search and inquiry.

Single or Group Messaging
The SMS can be sent out to individuals or a group of recipients

Methods of Sending SMS
Speed SMS provides many ways of sending SMS. The system can send out via GSM device, HTTP or SMTP API, or via Web Services interface.

Scheduler
With integrated Scheduler, Speed SMS can perform the task at specific interval or a predefined date/time.

Why Speed SMS
While there are plenty of SMS solutions on the market, most of them do not have the Data Warehouse and OLAP engine backing. Meaning that those SMS solution can be very good standalone solution or otherwise much afford will be required to integrate it to the operation system.

Speed SMS provide another option to have such integration at the Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence level which helps to reduce much integration work. As oppose to implement SMS for each operation system, Speedminer represents the consolidated environment and thus a better place to implement SMS system.

The send out SMS as well as the respond from SMS will be stored within Speedminer Data Warehouse and thus readily for analysis

Sample Case: Customer Satisfaction Survey
Within Speedminer, the user can have random selection of a portion of active customers which fulfill certain requirement (e.g. all who purchased Laptop), and let Speed SMS auto send out survey message according to the customer's language preference which stored in the database. The reply from the customers which may be in the form of rating (e.g. 1-9) will be stored in the Data Warehouse.

As all these information already stored within Speedminer Data Warehouse, we can easily find out the following

- What is the percentage of my customers who received the Survey   SMS?
- How many of them respond? Is there any trend showing correlation   between the ethnics group, or age group and the willingness to   respond to survey?
- Break down by department or salesperson, how is the satisfaction   level of the customer on the service delivered?

As users will want to know all this answer, naturally the Business Intelligence will be the best place to implement the SMS system.