Trust. A big word, and an important consideration in personal and business relationships.
Just take a look at your own environment. You will see that you’re surrounded by encounters where you’ll need to consciously decide whether you can trust someone or not … Your partner, friends, colleagues, business partners, and your customers. And usually, trust has to be earned.
When it comes to your messaging business, your customers have to trust you. They became your customers in the first place because they had a need to get their messages delivered. Your customers need to trust your ability to deliver, full stop. If you lose your customer’s trust, you will sooner or later lose the customer. So, how do you gain your customer’s confidence and keep it?
Here are three simple ways to secure better service quality through SMS testing so that, ultimately, you can secure your customer’s trust.
1. Get greater control of what happens to your customers’ messages
It’s not always easy to ensure that messages get where they are supposed to get when you rely on a third-party supplier. In fact, the only way you can actually determine what your provider is doing with your messages is to validate the message delivery itself. So, rather than relying on a supplier’s promise (and trusting them blindly), get measurable test results.
You can test the terminating SMS-C, the delivered sender ID, the delivered message content and even the delivery time. Frequent tests will allow you to secure the service quality, as you’ll be able to offer your customers the guaranteed assurance that their messages are being delivered to the right recipients at the right time – every time.
2. Consistency always produces better results
Of course, you can send messages to the phones of your colleagues, friends or suppliers but you’ll require them to send back a screenshot of the received message every time.
Unfortunately, you don’t just depend on knowing someone having a mobile device for the network to be tested, you also depend on their availability and openness to dedicate time for the tests. And even if your contacts are generally willing and available, you still might face limits when it comes to performing ad-hoc checks triggered by customer complaints.
But let’s assume for a moment that you have found the friendliest Test Mate Avatar. Would it be still good enough? Probably not! Just think about testing needs that go beyond a mere delivery test. How to test delivery to ported numbers? Special character/datacoding support, message concatenation and other message features? Will your tester be able to report the required quality parameters reliably? No matter how you twist or turn it, scalability looks different and, if you test more than the simple message delivery, you will face limitations.
Specialised SMS testing solutions allow you to independently test the necessary message delivery details at all times, either ad-hoc or scheduled. You can do this manually or even automatically, which enables the testing to become an integrated element of your routing platform and routing decisions.
3. Mitigate risk while saving on cost
Having a large testing pool allows you to mitigate the risk of test messages being ‘white-listed’ or handled incorrectly, as SMS testing endpoints can be defined, adjusted as required, and implemented.
Of course, test solution providers don’t offer their services for free. But the math is quite simple …Proper testing (and therefore route selection) based on pure facts leads to reliable message delivery. This, in turn, has a positive impact on the service experience, your reputation as a service provider and your customer retention rate. It also contributes to traffic growth over time.
And the cherry on top? You can reduce your customer support resources! Completely relying on supplier statements and ‘gut feeling’ will cause delivery problems to occur eventually and keep your support team unnecessarily busy and your customers moving traffic away from you. In short: your money is too valuable to waste it by not testing!
So what does all this tell us?
For an excellent customer experience, it’s not only sufficient to have great salespeople, an excellent sourcing team, experienced brains in route management, an educated support staff, a sophisticated platform, polished marketing materials and a bright business plan. All that helps you to be successful, but in the end, your customers’ service experience is primarily based on whether messages get delivered to the end-users’ mobile phones as promised. And for that, you need to be absolutely sure that your suppliers treat your messages with the necessary respect. Trust is not enough.
Don’t blindly trust suppliers because your customers’ experience also depends on their actions and ensuring your high-quality offering is under control. Put simply, a lack of testing will contribute to a bad enterprise experience. Consequently, enterprises will look for alternative channels, which completely bypass today’s value chain, including SMS service providers and operators.
Do you still have doubts about how to secure your messaging business with the help of testing? Do you need support performing sophisticated tests of your provider routes or of your routing configuration? Feel free to reach out to Global Telco Consult GTC. Let us help you do messaging better!
Global Telco Consult (GTC) is a trusted independent business messaging consultancy with deep domain knowledge in application-to-person (A2P) services. GTC provides tailor-made messaging strategies to enterprises, messaging service providers, operators and voice carriers. We have expertise in multiple messaging channels such as RCS, Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS for the wholesale and retail industry.
GTC supports its customers from market strategy through service launch, running the operations and supporting sales and procurement. The company started in 2016 with a mission to guide operators and telcos to embrace new and exciting opportunities and make the most out of business messaging. For more information or industry insights, browse through our blog page or follow us on LinkedIn.
