Service Disruption

Automate short notice rescheduling to minimise the cost and inconvenience of service disruption

An organisation booking its customers on to pre-scheduled services was burdened with significant cost and customer dissatisfaction if access to those services changed. Delays, postponements or cancellations would often mean that customers with existing bookings would need to be rescheduled at short notice. The organisation notified customers of changes required to their existing arrangements by email, but even of the customer accessed the email in time, this served only to inform and the onus was still on the customer contact the organisation to reschedule. This was time consuming and inconvenient for the customer and placed a huge burden on contact centres when experiencing disruption on a large scale.

View the Service Disruption process

Step 1

Send a message advising of a change to a scheduled booking

Step 2

Include alternative options in the message

Step 3

Allow the recipient to select from the options provided

Step 4

Use the response content to re-schedule the booking

Step 5

Issue a message confirming the revised schedule

To alleviate some of these issues, the organisation needed to be able to respond quickly and sought to reduce the impact upon the customer if its services were disrupted. Integrating Boomerang with its scheduling software allowed the organisation to communicate with customers via SMS to manage the initial booking, but crucially, to also automate rescheduling activities in the event of any short notice changes.

A message is now triggered to the customer confirming that the existing booking is no longer valid and provides the customer with a set of alternative options that can be selected by responding to the message. Based on the selection made, a confirmation message is returned including the updated booking information. The message also contains a contact centre number if the alternatives provided are not suitable.