We’re currently exploring the option of discontinuing our telephony server to reduce costs associated with server and card replacement. As part of this transition, we’re considering promoting the use of email as the primary communication method with our patrons.
We’re curious to hear from others who have already made the decision to stop using telephony altogether. What has been your experience with this transition? How did you handle patrons who don’t have email?
Additionally, we would appreciate any advice on related ILS settings that should be reviewed or changed during this process. Thank you in advance for any words of wisdom you can share.
We decided to keep the Polaris Telephony server here at Finger Lakes Library System since the ongoing cost is just the III Annual maintenance. Since our Telephony server was very long in the tooth (2008) and had gone thorugh an OS upgrade to 2012R2. I was able to source an inexpensive Dell server from https://www.stikc.com/ with a full height PCI-e slot (required), loaded Server 2019 and just moved the original Dialogics card after prep during a Polaris upgrade. Our outbound calls aren’t enough to incur any additional cost from our phone service provider.
Hope this helps,
Rex Helwig
Finger Lakes Library System
We are sticking with it. We ran into major issues about a year ago when the county moved us to Microsoft 365 - - we are having email issues still so telephone has been a reliable plan B.
The little consortium I’m with had to retire our telephony server recently (i-tiva), and we decided there are just too many patrons still using phone notices because they have no access to email outside the library. For equity we’re keeping the service. We migrated phone notices to UMS MessageBee last summer, and so far we’ve had a good experience with it.
I just received news from the IT folks that they are going to steer us towards a cloud solution and away from a server-based tool. If that is the case, I would like to look at something that is 3rd party, hosted, and could handle at least phone and SMS notifications since we use LX Starter for email
Hi Chad,
We do like it!
So far it has been really stable.
I wasn’t directly involved in setting up the data transfers, but that has generally gone ok. We decided to use emailed SSRS reports so we could control what data fields are included with the reports, so those reports had to be created/customized and scheduled.
Since then the only hiccup was a string of days last Nov/Dec where over 80% of the SMS traffic failed. They discovered our messages were missing the magic string ‘Text STOP to opt out of future SMS messages’ so when the carriers cracked down last fall, our traffic was hit. Problem fixed, and no worries since then. The only troubling thing was that we had to tell them there was a problem despite the high failure rate.
We’ve also only recently discovered we need to keep an eye on their list of accounts that have opted out of certain notices. Seems that for email it’s often the provider marking them as spam, so the patron doesn’t know they’re opted out. There’s only a handful, though, and even fewer SMS opt-outs.
So overall we like it.
Contracts in Washington State are public information, so we have no secrets no matter how much the vendors may wish it were so.
Phone notices are $0.10 per successful notice delivered (which may take multiple tries). Billed monthly. Annual costs are running below what we’d been paying for i-tiva plus the needed POTS lines.
SMS’s are pre-paid bundles. The first bundle was $0.048 per SMS, the 2nd was larger at $0.035 per SMS. Obviously that’s an increase over the $zero we paid with Polaris texts, but the delivery rate is so much better it’s not really comparable.