SMS rising

The past year has seen SMS volumes continue to rise around the world, while call volumes have dropped, as predicted. This trend has also been a wake-up call for many South African businesses, who now realise they have no choice but to communicate with customers via SMS, or risk losing touch.

These trends are borne out by international data. An August Washington Post article looks at how “the texting generation doesn't share boomers' taste for talk”. Latest Nielsen statistics report that in the US, teenagers send on average 3 339 SMSes a month, with girls sending as many as 4 050 SMSes. This is an 8% rise from the previous year; while voice saw a 14% drop in use over the same period. While the volumes might be lower, the increase in texting is consistent across all age groups.

Businesses have been forced to add an SMS channel to their in- and outbound communications with customers, or risk being totally disregarded.

If a company needs to reach a client, it could make multiple phone calls until getting hold of them, or it could send a single SMS, to be read as soon as the customer is able. This applies equally to marketing communications, where companies are increasingly building in an SMS reply channel from the outset for fully integrated communications; to customer service - a fault can now be reported to Telkom, and updates received via SMS; to debt collection - increasingly companies are texting reminders about overdue accounts before calling the customer.

This trend is expected to continue, with interconnect fee drops planned for the next three years, until South African interconnect rates reach 40c for both peak and off-peak calls by March 2013, according to ICASA's plan. While so far the reduction of interconnect fees hasn't resulted in the mobile operators lowering call costs, they are incentivising customers to use their phones more in order to recoup lost interconnect revenue. It may seem counter-intuitive, but this increase in call volumes is likely to mean that users answer fewer calls, and so could result in more SMSes being sent in order to reach people.

Unfortunately, in 2010 there seems to have been an increase in spam and scam SMSes, especially around the time of the World Cup. The infamous Nigerian 419 scam has made the leap to mobile, usually in the form of the recipient supposedly winning a competition. South African Vodacom subscribers might have noticed an apparent increase in spam from foreign numbers in 2010. Previously these SMSes appeared to be sent from a local number, but thanks to Vodacom preventing foreign senders from spoofing local numbers on SMSes, it is now evident when an SMS was sent from abroad. Cellphone users are reminded to maintain the same level of scepticism around SMSes from unknown senders as they should around e-mail.

One of the biggest stories in the mobile world in 2010 has been the rise, and rise, and rise of the smartphone

Dr Pieter Streicher is MD of BulkSMS.com.

Finally, one of the biggest stories in the mobile world in 2010 has been the rise, and rise, and rise of the smartphone. Analysts seriously underestimated the public's appetite for top-end phones, despite their price tags. TomiAhonen calculates there was a 30% quarter-on-quarter growth in smartphone take-up in the third quarter of 2010.

South Africa currently has a 16% smartphone penetration, according to Gartner, which predicts this will rise to 80% by 2014. It is unlikely that this smartphone growth trend is going to taper off in the near future, especially with Google's open source Android platform dramatically lowering the cost of smartphones.

Again, this is something one might expect would have a negative impact on SMS growth, but actually the reverse is true, with the myriad applications, particularly social gaming apps, incorporating SMS.

All in all, as SMS enters its 18th year, it is showing little sign of slowing down.