Victim Support Talks To Us About Two-Way Sms

The national charity providing support to victims and witnesses of crime, Victim Support, has deployed Boomerang’s innovative SMS messaging technology to provide faster and more efficient two-way communications with the people it helps. We caught up with Iain McCaskey, Information Resources Manager, Victim Support about how the technology is working for them.

By integrating with Victim Support’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM system, Boomerang is providing us with a streamlined process for contacting victims, reducing the amount of time spent manually maintaining records, and increasing the number of victims contacted following a crime.

Boomerang’s patented ‘threading’ technology enables us to automatically send a template text message from our Microsoft Dynamics case management system to a victim of a crime, asking whether or not they would like support services. The technology then allows victims to text back ‘yes’ or ‘no’; the response of which is again automatically fed back into Dynamics, triggering the next stage in the internal process. If a ‘no’ response is received, the victim’s details will be cleared from our records and if ‘yes’, the victim will be called to offer support.

We chose to implement Boomerang as we believe using SMS will enable us to get a better and timelier response from victims, particularly for our younger victims, who are more experienced with text messages and online technology.

The implementation of Boomerang has enabled us to quickly and effectively contact more of the 1.5 million people we aim to support each year through intelligent two-way text messages, whilst having visibility of the replies within our existing case management system. Boomerang’s patented technology is also allowing us to make better use of our volunteer resources as less time is spent on maintaining the records, and more time can be spent providing timely support and advice.

We rolled out Microsoft Dynamics CRM last summer, and completed the Boomerang implementation in October. Since then, we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of texts that have been sent to victims during that period. Early feedback has been that the system is making the whole process a lot simpler.

The support from Boomerang to date has been very good. SMS technology as a business communications tool has been vastly underutilised, but this is down to the fact that the two-way communication has always required manual intervention. This has now been solved, and it opens up so many more potential applications that are hugely valuable to organisations like Victim Support.