Dial a Student, the recruitment agency that helps students find jobs has celebrated its 14th birthday. Alexander Fischer, founder and MD of the company says "Over the past 14 years we have expanded and now have over 2500 students on our books. They are able to take up the workload of stocktaking, drivers, barmen etc and where possible we place them in areas where they have the best skills. Our task sometimes requires us to find up to one hundred temporary employees for a particular contract, and get them working within a day.
To this end, a year ago, we implemented the SMS321 solution from Econoserv to further improve our communication with our students and clients. The SMS321 solution allows any of our consultants to send one or sometimes hundreds of SMS to the students offering them a job at very short notice. Most students have cell phones and all know how to read and respond to an SMS.
"To save the students money we allow them to SMS their reply to us. The reply is stored for us to read on our PCs, and saves a huge amount of time, and money in telephone calls.
"Recently we needed students with an engineering background for an important client. We had already used SMS321 to make a group of qualified engineering students, so we sent an SMS to all potential students asking them to respond. We received over 20 responses within the hour and were able to fulfill our brief to our client faster than if we had put a team of telesales people together to call each student. It was also at far lower cost.
We also use SMS321 to send directions to the students to help them get to their places of work.
"We have instituted the SMS321 responder which has proved very popular and successful. Every day we update a template summarizing the current jobs available. Prospective workers then send and SMS containing the word JOBS to our SMS number which is 0824427981. The system receives the SMS and automatically responds with the information contained in the template, for example:
"FromDialaStudent {Auditors} required for stocktakes-Alexander, {PDP} {drivers} {Hostesses} {Waitrons} Reply via SMS or call 0114032996 ONLY IF REGISTERED"
Recently, we organized a celebratory evening for our 14th birthday party. We again used SMS to remind those people, who had responded to our invite, of the date, venue and time of the function.
Since we only pay 15 cents per SMS sent, we are now able to communicate more and more effectively with our students.
Keith Levenstein, CEO of Econoserv, developers of SMS321, said "Dial a Student was one of our first installations early in 2001. We rate our success, not on the number of installations, but on the number of companies still using our software. We are therefore thrilled that Dial A Student, in its fifteenth year, finds our software so useful, to the point of being indispensable.
"We regularly visit our customers to find out how they are progressing, and also to get feedback in order to improve our software. We are now in version 3 of SMS321, and it has gained a large market acceptance, due to its stability, ease of use and functionality.
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