Johannesburg, 25 May 2012
Xpedia is a privately held software and IT services company that was founded in 2003. Since then, it has always been its vision to be a global company, admired for its ethics and innovation that is a benefactor to its stakeholders and to society.
One of Xpedia's many success stories started with South Point, whose vision is: “To be South Africa's largest, leading independent provider of student accommodation outside of the universities themselves.” South Point offers secure, well-positioned buildings in the heart of university communities, nationally.
South Point was born out of a need to provide safe, clean, affordable and convenient student accommodation, filling a gap in the market by offering accommodation in environments conducive to promoting healthy studying.
South Point started out in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, by offering apartment and dormitory-style rentals in a number of desirable buildings within walking distance of the University of Witwatersrand, University of Johannesburg and other institutions. Currently, its Braamfontein portfolio provides accommodation to over 5 000 students, and it has grown to such an extent that it offers student accommodation not only in Johannesburg, but also Pretoria, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Durban.
One of South Point's biggest commitments is to create a sense of community among its students. It is South Point's priority to actively develop and maintain relationships with its students during their stay. It does this by sponsoring South Point sports teams, hosting activities for various societies, including debating and poetry societies, inviting motivational guest speakers to talk about topics that interest the students, and much, much more.
The need for an exceptional communication system between South Point and the student body was imperative. Communicating with thousands of students in various buildings in different geographical areas presents many challenges. Even though most of the students have cellphones, they tend to change their numbers regularly. Students may also change their rooms during the course of the academic year, and thus, for South Point, a communication tool that was adaptable was an important criterion when seeking an SMS-type communication solution.
TextConnect by Xpedia solved these problems. TextConnect is an online SMS communication tool that allows the user to send SMS messages to any number in South Africa and get feedback. This is ideal for surveys, event co-ordinators, schools, unions, sport clubs, churches, marketing and human resources departments, customer satisfaction feedback, or anyone who easily wants to contact a large group of people.
In South Point's case, TextConnect synchronises daily with South Point's Oracle EBS financial system and relevant contact information is transferred from its customer records. Cellphone numbers and contact groups are updated and students and groups are added and removed as necessary. This means information in TextConnect is always up to date.
The group management in TextConnect enables South Point to manage SMS sending to its student body. The sync process dynamically creates groups as may be necessary. There are designated groups for Buildings, Floors, and Precinct. The system works well if you need to send a specific message to a group of students that reside in a specific building, eg: “The water mains in building X is off and is being repaired.” The power of automatic groups lies in the fact that the groups are always up to date without any user intervention, and categorises the thousands of contacts into manageable chunks. Users can also create groups manually to facilitate processes like communicating to a society like the chess club to arrange a tournament.
Custom fields for contacts is another great TextConnect feature. These fields can be used as links to various systems like Oracle EBS or to store extra information like the outstanding amount on a person's account. Custom contact fields can be updated through the sync feature to make sure the content is always correct.
TextConnect's standard reply processing functionality makes it possible to categorise responses to your message according to rules. This makes it easy to send out surveys and process replies. Replies can be categorised and additional actions can be taken on certain categories, such as automatically replying to a message if someone answers “Yes”.
Anjoh Poolton, South Point's National Facilities Executive, states: “In my view, the tool has been invaluable to make and maintain contact with our student body on a national level on various subject matters. The use of this tool makes communication easier to a body of people that would otherwise be very difficult to communicate with, due to the immense volume that we accommodate. On a national level, we have almost 10 000 students living with us.”
TextConnect is easy to use and can be integrated with any ERP solution. The product can be customised to meet each business' specific SMS communication needs.
For further information, contact Johan Pretorius at Xpedia on 012 667 2970 or e-mail info@xpedia.co.za.
You can also visit the Xpedia Web site for information on other products: www.xpedia.co.za.
Share