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Cost comparison against voice charges to mobile phones

School Contact: A school of 817 pupils reduce their telephone costs by 49.58% contacting parents through SMS.

This figure does not include the additional office and teachers benefits and savings of being able to contact a group of parents simultaneously for communications like cancelled netball matches etc.

Calculations
The school has the need to reach parents or guardians for a wide range of reasons during the school day. They can include details on changed arrangement such as cancelled sports fixtures, sickness, truancy down to the simple act of advising that the child has left their lunch pack at home. With many of these communication urgent and time critical in nature and with more parents spending more time out of the home, the mobile phone is frequently the communication of choice. The school makes on average 37 mobile calls per week to parents.

The analysis and assumption made for this business case was that only 85% of these calls will be replaced by a SMS Message and each replaced phone call lasts only one minute.

This results in 1,480 telephone calls to parent per year, with an estimated 1,285 replaced by SMS messages (85% of the total). The total cost of the replaced voice calls is between £280 to £336 depending upon mobile network used.

The school purchases the minimum number of credits to replace these calls with SMS messages - total cost £120 (one 1,000 credits pack and three 100 credits packs)

Example using costs from cheapest BT to mobile network

Notes: All comparisons are based upon the BT call charges to mobile phones dated 29th May 2003 and are based upon the following assumptions.

1. Call to mobile user lasts one minute (can be longer if the recipient is not ready to write down information being communicated)

2. Call rates are in pence per minute. Minimum call charges or set-up fee apply. The prices in these examples are for example only and are subject to change. Every effort is made to ensure that the price comparisons are correct but if you require information on cost savings then please contact us at solutions@websetters.co.uk for details.

3. Information to be communicated is contained within one SMS message.

4. No consideration is made of the real people costs that can be saved in phoning the recipients which is often takes be longer than sending a SMS message. This is especially so if a number of mobile workers or clients need the same information. Each has to be phoned individually while a single SMS can be distributed to many recipients.

5. No consideration is made on the further savings or increased business that can be achieved through communicating with people in a cost efficient and reliable manner