Case Study - eCensus

Winner of the 2007 MMA Award for "Best B2B or Enterpise Application"

Dialect Interactive worked with industry leading Call Centre provider SalesForce to deliver one of the largest mobile messaging solutions deployed in Australian corporate history as part of the 2006 ABS Census project.

The Census project relied heavily on an SMS messaging solution deployed by Dialect Interactive, that enabled SalesForce’s Call Centre agents to communicate effectively with over 20,000 Census paper collection walkers.

During the Census project every household in Australia received an ABS Census form delivered by the team of over 20,000 Census walkers. A walker database was subsequently created containing each walker’s mobile phone number and collection area. This database was loaded into the project management system and subsequently utilised by SalesForce Call Centre agents during the project to contact the walkers through voice and SMS (via Dialect).

At the time of Census form delivery, a specific collection time and day was communicated to the household owner by the relevant area walker.

The SMS solution was primarily utilised during the project in two key situations:

(1) In the event of a household needing to request an alternate pick up time for their completed Census form, a call was placed to the SalesForce Call Centre with the new collection details logged into the project management system. These pick up variation notifications were then sent via SMS to the relevant walker.

(2) Feeding into the project management system were details of households that had completed their Census paper online. Once a Census paper had been completed online, an SMS message was sent to the relevant walker advising them that they were no longer required to pick up the ‘paper form’.

The use of SMS as a primary communication channel during the project helped eliminate over 1M outbound calls to the walkers. Dialect provided SalesForce with a fully redundant SMS messaging solution that included:

• Full messaging redundancy through dual SMS gateways (including 24 x 7 support)
  
• A dedicated secure API between the Dialect sites and SalesForce
  
• Intelligent business logic including message throttling per walker (ensuring the walker’s mobile phone inbox was not swamped with incoming messages)
  
• Message validity rules – ensuring SMS messages were queued overnight and only sent to walkers during business hours
• Detailed messaging reporting including SMS delivery receipts
  

Timeframe:

The project ran nationally during August 2006. Extensive planning including a trial broadcast took place over the 18 month preceding the Census collection in August 2006.

Planning:

SalesForce required a service provider who could:

• Minimise project management and contracting overheads
  
• Provide reliable SMS service delivery to agreed time frames
  
• Assure the highest possible levels of availability (>99.5%) and reliability
  

Specifically SalesForce required:

• A fully redundant integrated messaging solution capable of delivering over 2M SMS messages over a 30 day period (including the ability to push over 1M messages out on the day after the Census collection)
  
• A dedicated API between Dialect and SalesForce
  
• Tracking on-time delivery of messages sent to handsets using SMPP delivery receipts
  
• Extensive pre-campaign testing took place due to the national importance of the Census project.
  

Creative:

The mobile communication business logic used in the campaign was not only extremely innovative but effective and ultimately underpinned the success of the Census project. Key highlights of the approach to the service build are outlined below.

• Recognising the changes in technology that had taken place since the previous Australian Census – conducted in 2001, SalesForce and the ABS agreed to add an SMS component to improve the efficiency in collection of 2006 Census forms.
  
• In previous years, Census collectors had to call a number to collect messages advising which households had Census forms ready for collection. The ABS sought to automate the process so that messages were automatically sent to Census collectors with instructions around Census form collection, thus improving overall efficiency and reducing costs for collection of 2006 Census forms.
  
• Using its expertise in customer communication, Salmat was able to develop a walker database for the 2006 Census, which integrated advice received from Australian households and processes it into instructions for Census collectors.
  
• Dialect was able to customise its SMS interface to enable it to communicate with the walker database so that instructions from Australian households received via the 1300 service (or when forms were completed online) were communicated to form collectors via SMS.
  
• An additional requirement by SalesForce was that form collectors should not be bombarded by a constant stream of SMS messages and should not receive messages outside a pre-determined window of time. Dialect was able to add features to enable special SMS functionality so that messages were sent no more than once an hour and that a maximum of 20 messages were sent at any time.
  

Effectiveness:

All of the campaign objectives / SLA’s set out by SalesForce/ABS for the mobile messaging solution were met or exceeded during the project. Highlights included:

• Delivering over 1M messages during the Census collection period;
  
• Providing delivery receipt reporting on all messages sent;
  
• Maintaining service level availability above the required 99.5% for the duration of the project.
  

Innovation:

Dialect was able to meet SalesForce’s objectives and provide a customisable solution at an extremely competitive price due to its unique SMS ‘message-bus’ architecture. The service success depended on the combination of a number of innovative service delivery components including:

• the use of dual SMS gateways (with hot swap capability)
  
• secure XML messaging via a dedicated API between SalesForce and Dialect
  
• the creation of optimised messaging business rules including message throttling, delivery receipts and message validity ensuring messages were only delivered during business hours
  

Integration:

The success of the Census project depended on a seamless integration between the Dialect’s SMS gateway and the project management system (CIS application). To achieve the level of sophisticated integration required for campaign success, Dialect & SalesForce utilised a combination of XML messaging.

Key Learnings:

The innovative integrated messaging solution deployed during the 2006 Census project proved without a doubt that mobile messaging is an extremely cost effective and robust communication channel for large scale corporate projects of critical national interest. SalesForce were delighted with the overall success of the project, CTO Aaron Panozza had this to say about the project and Dialect’s key involvement:

"When SalesForce won the 2006 ABS Census project we knew that taking on a project of this size would be both challenging and rewarding. During the planning phase of the project we looked to mobile as an emerging communication channel that we could leverage to produce time and cost saving efficiencies across our Call Centres. Dialect Interactive were able to seamlessly integrate with our Call Centre software and helped devise a mobile communication strategy that proved to be extremely robust, handling huge SMS message throughput over an extremely short period of time."

Aaron Panozza, CTO of SalesForce

Privacy & Database Collection:

As all of the Census collectors and Call Centre agents were employed by either ABS / Salmat / SalesForce as part of the project, a condition of employment was that they agreed to be communicated with via SMS. No household information was captured or stored via mobile during the campaign.