Support, from thepeople who built it.
When the gate opens, we are already here.
A school day does not wait for a support ticket. Registers are taken at eight, results go out at four, and a parent expects an answer in between. So the team behind SMS is reachable around the clock — and every change you ask for is thought through before a line of it is written.
- 24/7
- 1
- 0
Reachable every day of the year, on four channels.
One team, and it is the team that built the system.
You are not routed through a call centre that has never seen a school. The people who answer are the people who wrote the attendance service and the fee ledger, which is why the second reply is usually the fix rather than another question.
- Inside SMSRaise it where it happened. We get the campus, the role and the screen with it, so nobody has to describe the problem twice.
- WhatsApp & phoneWhen the gate is queueing and the reader has stopped, a message beats a form. A named person on your account picks it up.
- EmailChange requests, exports, anything an IT lead or an auditor will want to point back to later.
- On siteFor the weeks that decide a school's year, we would rather be in the building than on a call.
| Band | What it means | Looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Blocking | The school cannot run | The gate will not scan. Nobody can sign in. Results will not publish on results day. |
| Urgent | A part of the day is broken | One campus's notifications are not going out. A report returns the wrong total. |
| Normal | Wrong, but there is a way round it | A filter misses a case. A column exports in the wrong order. |
| Request | You want it to do something new | A new report, a different workflow, another field on the admission form. |
Every report is graded the moment it lands, not when it reaches a queue. The grade decides who wakes up.
Every change you ask for goes through five steps.
We ask questions before we agree.
A school system that changes on impulse is a school system nobody trusts by March. So when you ask for something new, the first thing you get back is not a delivery date — it is a set of questions. Most requests change shape once they are asked properly, and the version that ships is better than the version that was asked for.
You ask
In whatever form it arrives — a sentence in a meeting, a screenshot, a complaint from a section head. Nothing needs to be written up first.
We ask back
Who else does this touch? What do you do today instead? What happens to last year's data? Which role should not see it? This is the step most vendors skip, and it is the step that decides whether the change helps in June.
- Who else in the school does this affect?
- What is the workaround you are using now?
- Should this apply to every campus, or one?
- What should happen to the records already in the system?
- Who must not be able to see or change it?
- How will you know, in a term, that it worked?
We write it down
You get the plan back in plain language before anything is built: what changes, what it replaces, what it does not do, and where it appears. If the written version is not what you meant, correcting it costs a message rather than a release.
We build and test it
Against your own data shape — your grades, your fee heads, your roles — not a demo school. Anything that touches attendance, marks or money is checked twice, because those are the three a school cannot un-ring.
It rolls out
Released deliberately, announced before it appears, and documented in the same place your staff already look. Nothing new turns up on a Monday morning that nobody was told about.
What this rules out
- A feature that appears overnight and changes how your staff worked yesterday.
- A change made for one school that quietly breaks the way another one runs.
- A yes in a meeting that nobody wrote down.
- A rollout during exam week.
The mobile apps get the same team and the same hours.
Most of the people SMS serves never open a laptop. Parents check a notification at the gate, teachers mark a register between periods, students look up a timetable on the bus. The mobile apps are not a companion to the product — for most of your school they are the product, and they get the same team and the same hours.
iOS and Android
Parents, students and staff, on both platforms, from the same release. No feature that exists on only one phone.
Released, not abandoned
We handle store submissions, review responses, OS upgrades and the annual signing renewals — the work that quietly kills school apps built once and left.
The web too
Everything the app does, the browser does. A parent with an old phone and a school laptop are not second-class users.
Built for a weak signal
A register taken in a basement classroom and a scan at a gate on a bad connection both have to survive. They do.
The app goes out under your school's name, not ours.
A parent should download their child's school, not their school's vendor. It is your reputation the app is standing in for every morning, so our default position is that the app goes out under your school's identity — your name, your icon, your colours, your listing. We stay the engine underneath and are perfectly happy to be invisible.
SMS, quietly. Parents never need to know our name to trust the app.
Your name
The app is listed and installed as your school, not as SMS and not under a reseller's brand.
Your icon and colours
Crest, palette and splash are yours. The interface follows your identity rather than ours.
Your listing
Store description, screenshots and the support contact parents see all belong to the school.
Your communication
Notifications, emails and messages go out from the school's name — not from a system a parent has never heard of.
We take the opposite view from vendors who require their badge on your parents' home screens. If it helps the school to be the one they trust, that is the arrangement we want.
Ask us something difficult.
The fastest way to judge a support team is to send it a real problem before you have signed anything. We would genuinely rather that than a slide about response times.