With 11,000 members, the Australian Physiotherapy Association (APA) is the peak body representing the interests of physiotherapists and their patients in Australia. Whilst the APA is very focussed on representing their members and industry, they also have the yearly challenge of collecting membership fees – the lifeblood of the association.
The membership renewal process involves sending letters, emails and then following up the unpaid members with telephone calls. Of course this is a very costly and time-consuming exercise, not to mention a strain on staff resources.
In February 2008, the Western Australia office of the APA decided to trial our voiceREACH service to send automated telephone reminders to all unpaid members. The APA simply had to record a message over the 1800 number and export a list of unpaid members from their database – voiceREACH did the rest!
Have a listen to the message they sent below.
The voice broadcast was sent out at 10am on a Thursday, followed by a SMS message at 2pm the same day. The SMS was just a friendly reminder of the number to call in order to renew your membership, just in case you couldn’t write it down when you received the telephone call.
“Tony was a great help in getting us started, we were provided with a sample format on how to prepare our data with the phone numbers we wanted to call via the voiceREACH system. Sue (our membership officer) ran a report query and saved it in a spreadsheet, and then added a column to use the home phone number for those we didn’t have phone numbers for and saved it in the format that was required. We were also provided with instructions for recording our message to be ‘played’ to our members. Sue set up the message over the phone and found the whole process quite easy. From the feedback we got from those who called us to renew after getting the voiceREACH reminders, all said that they appreciated getting the reminder and most said that they found the SMS the most useful because it had our phone number there for easy reference.”
Hilary Brakewell, General Manager, AUSTRALIAN PHYSIOTHERAPY ASSOCIATION - WA
The results of the voice broadcast and SMS reminders were excellent. In less than 48 hours, the APA had received renewals from almost 10% of the members outstanding. The ROI on the use of the voice and SMS technology 4200%! The APA is now looking to run similar trials in the other state offices around Australia.
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