It was great to see a lot of customers and other vendor partners at ALA in Chicago this past weekend! The skies were blue, and the humidity was low making for a great Chicago visit.
Based on our conversations at ALA, faulty text message delivery are frustrating a lot of library professionals! Many libraries are struggling to have their text-message notifications delivered to patrons. There has been so much change in the telecommunication industry as they seek to reduce the volume of spam messages transiting their systems. Things like sms-email-gateways are now increasingly not being delivered, or if they are delivering, it is often delayed by several hours. Unique’s MessageBee system is well positioned to help with this problem – our texts are native SMS and we maintain a strong relationship with our Tier-1 telecom carrier, so when there are issues, Unique can make an impact to get messages delivered.
We also talked with a number of folks about our upcoming TechProtect+ service designed to enhance our existing Material Recovery process. For libraries that are lending out higher value items such as hotspots, chromebooks, or the like and having them NOT come back to the library, TechProtect+ will offer a stepped-up communication process designed to convey the urgency to return those materials to the library. That helps make them available to all patrons that would like to use them and keeps costs down for the library.
It was a great Chicago weekend, we look forward to talking with you soon!
-Rob