The myths of SMS

Global adoption of SMS as a business communications medium is increasing, yet there are still businesses that believe that there are valid reasons not to use this highly popular medium as a communications tool. These businesses are probably the same ones who believed in the 1980s and early 1990s that e-mail will never really take off, citing numerous reasons why it cannot be used in business.

The fact that e-mail is currently the communications medium of choice for many businesses across the globe is due to the dispelling of the myths that had surrounded the medium, coupled with higher accessibility of e-mail and a better comprehension thereof by its user-base.

SMS will follow the same route, and it is only a matter of time before it is adopted by most businesses as a communications tool of choice for specific applications. What needs to happen before then, however, is for potential users to become aware of the myths surrounding commercial SMS usage, and gain a better understanding of what the true state of affairs is.

Clickatell lays bare some of these myths.

SMS delivery does have a cost attached to it, but so does any other communications medium. The fact is that if SMS messaging is used correctly, it can actually save a significant amount of money. Consider the following: To manage a call centre for standard questions such as balance requests, etc, could cost you around R40 per call, while automating an SMS system to send balance updates on request will be around 1% of that.

Other traditional mediums, such as fax and snail-mail, also have a higher cost attached, and e-mails are not always the answer, with the adoption rate for cellphones currently far higher than for Internet access. Furthermore, SMS merge applications (such as Clickatell`s Messenger-PRO) will allow the sender to customise in excess 10 000 SMS messages at the click of a button, thereby addressing each of the recipients by his/her name.

This is exactly what the consultants would like you to believe, since this is where their bread and butter comes from. The fact is that Clickatell provides simple, easy to use tools that allow you to integrate SMS delivery into your existing system: this enables you to "plug in" to an SMS delivery gateway. Should you, for instance, manage a system which already sends out e-mail alerts (or any kind of automated e-mail messages), it will take only a few moments to set it up to send e-mails to Clickatell`s e-mail-to-SMS gateway. HTTP posts or XML integration can also be done, and for Windows developers there exists a rapid-development COM object.

Even simpler than this are the bulk SMS tools that Clickatell provides, including FTP, Web-based tools, installable software and more. All tools and protocols are available from Clickatell at no charge aside from the cost per SMS.

Clickatell provides you with real-time reporting and an extensive message history, allowing you to manage all your communications with ease. Messages can be exported to Excel or automatically updated on your database, enabling you to map responses to outgoing communications. Should you wish to integrate your servers with Clickatell`s gateways, message statuses can be routed back to your servers as they change. A perception of lack of reporting is one of the largest barriers for SMS usage, as it is seen as an intangible medium with no real record of what actually happened until the message is delivered.

Clickatell, however, believes in extensive reporting, which can even be accessed through an online Web environment. The legalities regarding stored communications also dictates that all communications made on behalf of a business need to be stored, which is something that few providers will comply with.

Depending on the provider you use to deliver SMS, this may not in fact be a myth. It is, however, a highly reliable medium and protocol, which uses a store and forward method of communication with recipients. This simply means that as long as the message reaches the SMSC (the destination network`s message service centre), you can rely on the message being delivered. Specifically with global delivery this may be questioned, but the key here is to obtain true message statuses from the provider or aggregator that you choose.

This comes back to reporting, in that the sender of a particular message needs to know whether the message is queued, delivered to the handset or if it had failed for a particular reason.

Although SMS marketing was one of the first success stories surrounding the medium, thousands of other applications for this protocol have been successfully applied. These range from CRM functions to stock quotes, ringtones and logos, weather alerts, server alerts, medical alerts, polls, games, airtime purchases and even paying for parking meters. These are just the tip of the iceberg, with new applications seeing the light of day on a daily basis.

For a free guide on how SMS can benefit your business, please download it from: http://www.clickatell.com/central/campaigns/redir.php?cid=463