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| Customer: | Kirklees Council | .jpg) |
|---|---|---|
| Services: | SMS API | |
| Website: | www.kirklees.gov.uk |
Councils across the UK are turning on to the benefits of communicating with local residents and employees through the use of SMS services from Esendex, the leading provider of text messaging solutions for businesses and the public sector.
One of the first to recognise the opportunities for SMS was Kirklees Metropolitan Council in West Yorkshire, which embraces the technology as part of its Chatback programme, an initiative to reach out to young people in the area. The project enables young people to receive free text messages that keep them up to date with news and information on issues and activities that are relevant to them in the area, such as offers, accommodation, events and gigs, activities and workshops.
A spokesman for the council explains:
“We realised that this group of people all used mobile phones and were into texting, the service was promoted via our Web site and traditional forms of marketing and has now attracted several hundreds of subscribers, who receive text messages based on their chosen keywords. The whole system is automated.”
Alongside Kirklees’ Chatback initiative, the council’s own IT team worked on developing a bespoke software solution that works with its systems to increase the flexibility of how the council sends and receives text messages to and from its own employees. Called iTex, the XML-based solution is now available to any council within the UK and, among other features, the software enables them to automatically route messages to or from other applications such as email or the Web.
“As one example, our emergency duty officer receives email notification from the Met Office whenever a severe weather warning is issued. Using iTex, linked into the Esendex service, we have set a rule so these messages are re-routed to his mobile phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
The council is also looking at other ways to use text messaging to keep in touch with its employees and sees a role for the technology in keeping contact with field workers. The spokesman concludes:
“We initially chose the Esendex service because of its accreditation with Orange, but we have found the SMS API to be very cost effective and remarkably easy and quick to implement – the fact that it’s Web-based makes life so easy for us.”
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