When the short message service is referred to by any of its more recognised given names - text messaging, texting, mobile messaging, etc - it's readily seen as a wireless tool for social interactions and checking the weather. Yet, in classifying SMS as a media channel for business, many businesses still aren't sure where it fits into their enterprise and contact centre operations.
But the sooner they formulate a plan for SMS, the better. Because as texting volumes threaten to surpass those of e-mail and voice, the value of SMS has become increasingly magnified.
Factors behind the acceptance of SMS
Telenor Nordic Mobile provides communications services throughout Europe and Asia, and Finn Trosby is one of the company's senior advisers. In March 2004, Trosby characterised SMS this way: “No one within GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) was even close to comprehending the wilderness of applications SMS could lead to... customising the mobile handset by download of the required parameters, short message as the initiator of push services, none of those applications were thought of even vaguely. They came about because SMS was at hand, virtually from the start within and between any GSM network and easy to apply.”
SMS... the new preferred channel?
The pace of texting worldwide has increased immeasurably as service providers have made SMS easier to use, particularly between networks.
Among service providers leading the surge, one need only look at Google and its integrated SMS offering for mobile phones (Google SMS is supported on all major mobile providers in the US). Using the service, Google users can text a special number and instantly access the Internet's considerable resources for businesses and product information anywhere in the world.
More than 3 billion mobile users by 2014
Globally, Gartner estimates that by 2014, more than three billion of the world's adult population (over age 18) will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology. Making Gartner's estimate notable for businesses is its emphasis on the advances in mobile payment, commerce and banking technologies, which will make it easier to electronically transact via mobile Internet access and associated technologies such as SMS.
Combined with the trend of emerging economies worldwide, Gartner's findings indicate a 90% mobile penetration rate and 6.5 billion actual mobile business connections annually by the year 2014. Cash transactions will remain dominant in emerging markets by 2014, according to Gartner; however, the foundation for electronic transactions will be well under way. Think of the Internet before e-commerce.
SMS plumbing
Contact centres led the early business-customer adoption phases of SMS, and essentially treated the technology as an extension of e-mail. In infrastructure terms, there were several barriers to integrating SMS this way, in that proprietary networks, modems and agreements with SMS brokers posed collective hurdles.
The value of SMS has become increasingly magnified.
Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.
To process text messages, for instance, the standard practice was to send an e-mail to a cellphone number, and then rely on the provider to deliver it as an SMS message to the customer. Due primarily to modems that could be unstable, message delivery was both slow and unreliable.
SMS technology has progressed to the point that it now plugs directly into the corporate network, however, and in place of modems in telecom rooms are standard TCP/IP connections to SMS brokers. Standards such as SOAP, HTML and others commonly used elsewhere in many organisations also have replaced the proprietary tools originally required to build interfaces between SMS and other communications applications.
Likewise, newer integration capabilities for SMS are trending toward HTTP-based brokers, allowing an organisation to make use of brokers that support HTTP as a transport mechanism to send and receive messages. This support provides a much wider footprint of brokers to process SMS messages on a global basis.
Common SMS business drivers
Short message service in large part has already reached “established” status in the business sector. Banks, for instance, have used SMS-based alerts now for years to notify customers of new services and things like account overdrafts and potentially fraudulent activities.
Mobile telco carriers alert their subscribers to service updates. And Google SMS has opened the door to information on thousands of consumer products with its portable FAQs.
Consider these common SMS business drivers, for example:
* Goods and services “over the Internet”
* Mobile marketing
* Employee collaboration
* Transport and logistics
* Notifications and data distribution
* Remote system monitoring
Perhaps more than any communications media to date, SMS allows companies of any size and shape to converge established business practices with creativity - meaning the possibilities for SMS are limitless.
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