SMS: A core business tool if integrated within corporates

Companies wanting to use SMS as a strategic business communications tool should look for a solution that can integrate with their ERP system to enable their core mission-critical applications.

That's the word from Barry Prinsloo, sales director at SMS Cellular Service, providers of the CellSys SMS technology. He says companies wanting to leverage the true power of SMS need to be able to integrate their SMS communications systems with their other business applications such as customer relationship management and helpdesk management.

Says Prinsloo: "An enterprise needs a system that is designed for openness and easy integration with its existing infrastructure. This will allow the company to deploy SMS-enabled applications quickly and easily, with minimal cost."

Such a SMS system allows the enterprise to be able to streamline and automate communications, reducing costs by cutting down on the amount of human intervention necessary. Prinsloo uses the example of a consumer-focused company that wants to improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of debt collection through the use of SMS.

By integrating its SMS solution with its CRM system, it can rapidly deliver personalised automated messages to thousands of customers an hour by triggering SMS events according to parameters such as data, amount owed or credit limit.

Data such as the debtor's name and the amount of money he or she owes can be inserted into the SMS message field and despatched to a cellphone with no human intervention. A fully bi-directional system will not only allow the company to dispatch outbound messages, but also to harvest inbound messages that can be used to update the core database.

Prinsloo also stresses the importance of logging, auditing and reporting functionality in an enterprise-class SMS system. The company needs to be sure at all times of the status of all messages - which of them have been dispatched and received, and which were undeliverable, perhaps because the user supplied an incorrect number or has been disconnected from the network.

A high-end system should also provide functionality that allows abusive users to be easily traced and costs to be allocated to the correct department or business unit. The company should be able to offer access to the SMS functionality and database according to the roles that staff fulfil in the organisation - for example, a manager may have complete access to the system while a call centre agent is only able to send out messages based on a particular set of templates.

"As SMS grows in importance as a communications channel, companies will need to look for solutions that are robust and highly-available. In many instances, companies will be replacing or complementing voice communications with SMS, so they need a system that is as reliable as the traditional PSTN.

"That means organisations should choose an SMS service provider who has a resilient network, has a scalable solution, and a base of customers who have pushed that network hard with their communications needs," says Prinsloo.

Many companies will start off with a few thousand SMS messages a month and watch demand rapidly accelerate into hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages a month - they need a system that can cater for that kind of growth. Others will experience peaks and troughs in demand - the SMS service provider and its costs should be adaptable enough to respond.

"Organisations that want to use SMS as a low-cost and powerful tool to communicate with their customers should ensure that the SMS service provider they partner with adheres to the laws and guidelines that cellular service providers and the government have established to govern electronic communications," says Prinsloo.

Last, but not least, Prinsloo advises companies to choose a SMS service provider that has hooks into the systems of all the major local operators and international SMS aggregators.