Goodwill Utilizes SII’s Outbound Notification System (ONS) Solution to Validate 3 Million Pieces of Media Delivery

Goodwill Utilizes SII’s Outbound Notification System (ONS) Solution to Validate 3 Million Pieces of Media Delivery

Customer

Goodwill of North Florida, a diversified human service organization, self-funded by its network of retail stores and other revenue generating ventures, one of which is a major national media group, that specializes in direct marketing for businesses in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. The company focuses on door-to-door delivery of promotional products to homes, apartments, and businesses in North America. This customer has the ability to target its marketing efforts to the neighborhood level, delivering marketing and other promotional related materials to households and businesses based on specific demographic information.

Challenge

The challenge was for the customer to distribute over 3 million door hanger advertisement articles and phonebooks. These door hangers and phonebooks were distributed to multi-route regions within four weeks by the media group couriers. While the actual delivery was 7 days a week, the validation of successful delivered articles was required to be done within a window of forty eight hours after the drops for each route. Validation was done by conducting an automated survey through telephone calls. The phone calls were to be done 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM for residential customers, and 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM for business customers adjusted for the regional local time zones. The validation process for these delivered articles would be started immediately after the completion of each delivery route. The results needed to be captured and reported within two days of receiving the list of phone numbers and right after the conclusion of the survey for each region.

Solution

Goodwill of North Florida needed to verify the successful delivery of these items for both residential and business customers of this major national media group so selected SII to utilize its Outbound Notification System (ONS) application to enhance and modernize their existing operation, and expand their outbound call handling bandwidth on a much larger scale.

This application was developed by SII to manage notifications, though it can also simply dispatch a message to a pre-selected group of people. ONS can also provide automated surveys to customers and collect results in a database for future reference.

As the project began, the Goodwill of North Florida provided SII the list of phone numbers for those regions which had completed the drops. The list was provided in a database. SII uploaded the numbers to the ONS system, and utilizing dedicated PRI phone lines, dialed the numbers, played back the initial greetings, conducted the surveys, collected the results and posted the results back to the same database.

Once ONS completed the required percentage of data collection for validation of successful deliveries from each region, a custom management report was generated by the system for the Goodwill of North Florida management review. The management report contained milestones, indicating the project progress and successful completion of each route. Also, the same database table, with additional customized fields populated from detailed call results of ONS, was transferred to the Goodwill of North Florida according to the required specifications.

During the processing time, if for any reason the system did not reach the required percentage of successful results, the ONS dynamically placed the same batch in front of the next day queue for reprocessing. The ONS dashboard allowed SII support to monitor the number of placed calls and line traffic in real time. During a spike in volume of numbers to be dialed, SII increased the number of PRI lines dynamically to process a substantial batch of outbound numbers, and completed the project within the set schedule.

Results

SII’s successful completion of the door hanger/phonebook validation project for the Goodwill of North Florida resulted in:

• 100% accurate, scalable and flexible solution, with consistent and reliable results, and big savings for the customer.
• Prompt validation within 48 hours, and immediate feedback through timely and customized management reports