Mobicage NV, a mobile communications start-up, has released Rogerthat, an innovative platform aimed at revolutionising communication and process automation via smartphones and tablets.
The app and cloud based service use a unique and patent pending “multiple choice messaging” approach to enable real-time and interactive communication. With Rogerthat, organisations can automate communication between IT systems and their employees, customers and subscribers to improve the customer service experience and drive down costs.
As a platform aiming to fundamentally challenge traditional communication methods including email and SMS, developer Mobicage wanted to make a simple declaration so “Rogerthat” became both the product name and a mission statement.
Unlike email or SMS, a Rogerthat message contains interactive elements such as buttons, sliders, text input fields, or barcode scans. Responding to a message is simple and intuitive, often requiring no more than a single click. This questionnaire-like approach generates a dramatic increase in user responsiveness. Moreover, the structured responses can easily be interpreted by server software to automate tasks or facilitate backend processes.
“SMS, email and the social media are great for simply delivering information from a source to a wider community, but those technologies were never designed to be truly interactive or able to process decisions,” explains Carl D’Halluin, CEO for Mobicage, “Rogerthat is unique because it is designed from the ground up to allow organisations to quickly develop, deploy and benefit from structured two way communication.”
“This distinction between a passive message and an active Rogerthat communication stream is a truly innovative element within our technology, and the results can be seen at some of the beta customers we have worked with during the development phase,” D’Halluin adds.
The Rogerthat platform enables tremendous simplifications and cost savings in daily business operations. For example, customer service can quickly automate processes like managing delivery times or the RTM of products. Organisations with field service staff can use the technology for alerting, appointment management and scheduling. Within logistics, track and trace applications can benefit from the toolset as do marketing activities like customer feedback and surveys.
The simplicity and the structured interactive approach make Rogerthat an accessible communication medium for deaf or technologically unsophisticated people, for example in case of an emergency or in m-Health or m-Care scenarios.
The platform also supports QR and barcodes to allow users to scan codes via mobile phone cameras for processes such as warranty certificates, mail-in rebates, or product identification. The platform can also use the built in features of mobile devices such as cameras, GPS, motion detectors and other elements to deliver new forms of interactive communications.
Behind the scenes, Mobicage provides a complete set of tools including a Message Flow Designer offering a drag and drop method of turning business content into a flow of communication. For the more technical, a full programming API is available to provide deeper integration between Rogerthat and CRM, ERP and bespoke applications.
“We are now reaching the point where smartphones are the most prevalent form of communication and Rogerthat is the first service platform to allow organisations to quickly automate true decision making two way communications without having to invest in expensive technology or dedicated programming expertise.”
To help potential customers and system integration partners understand the power of Rogerthat, Mobicage is offering free Rogerthat trial kits for a limited period. Organisations that have trialled the technology during the closed beta like Audi car dealer Ghent NAM Zuid and IT monitoring specialist Hestia are now using Rogerthat in production environments.
“We are convinced that the Rogerthat platform will trigger the next wave of process automation which was simply not possible before the widespread adoption of the smartphone,” explains Geert Audenaert, CTO for Mobicage, “Today’s connected generation creates a plethora of opportunities for communication-based automation.”
Rogerthat is currently available for iPhone and Android phone. For more information please visit: http://www.rogerthat.net
Additional information: Customer use case – Hestia Managed Services
A beta customer that Mobicage worked with in the development of Rogerthat is Hestia Managed Services, a market leader for ICT infrastructure maintenance and hosting services in Belgium. Hestia has a large on-call workforce which is responsible for monitoring and managing its customers ICT infrastructure. It uses an automated system to alert on-call personnel when an anomaly has been detected. However, traditional e-mail or text (SMS) based alerting has a number of shortcomings such as unreliability, lack of interactivity, and lack of control by the sender.
Instead, Hestia replaced its traditional alerting system with the Rogerthat Platform. This allowed Hestia to improve their operational excellence, respond better to alerts and resolve issues faster. “Rogerthat allows us to dramatically improve how we communicate with our field staff and reduce the administrative hurdles we used to face with emails and SMS technology,” explains Wim Kelchtermans, head of the Hestia Shared Service Centre.
In addition, it was difficult to confirm that that SMS text message or email actually made it to the smartphone of the recipient and had been read and understood. Instead, Rogerthat offers embedding interactive buttons in the alert messages, which can control workflows and scheduling at Hestia in a secure way.
