Along with cost, ease of use is one of the biggest factors in people’s decisions to buy products and services. Ease of use is exactly what makes text messaging so popular. All a message recipient has to do is pull out the phone they have with them to read and respond to messages. For senders, SMS alerts are more convenient than calling large numbers of people, and have much higher open rates than email.
But how easy is it to send SMS messages at scale? There’s good news and bad news. The bad news: Writing your own software to send SMS alerts from your applications isn’t easy at all. If you wanted to try, you’d have to deal with hardware issues, carrier contracts, and software development and maintenance — all tasks that do nothing to help you move your business forward.
The good news is that no one has to write SMS gateways nowadays. Companies like Plivo provide communications platforms as a service (CPaaS) and make it easy to send bulk text messages for notifications and alerts.
With Plivo, you can programmatically create personalized SMS alerts and notifications for any type of activity on customers’ accounts. Plivo’s RESTful API is easy to work with, and its syntax should be familiar to developers who have experience with Twilio’s API.
Customers appreciate Plivo’s ease of use. In a recent G2 review, one customer said, “Right from signing up to setting up the service and using the service, everything is clear and smooth.”
In fact, Plivo customer Luxer One found that adapting the code to use Plivo alongside their existing solution took only about 12 hours, and actually integrating Plivo into Luxer One’s application took just a few hours more.
Plivo doubles down on ease of use by providing Plivo High-Level Objects (PHLO), a visual design studio that lets you create custom communication workflows for both voice and SMS without coding. PHLO employs prebuilt templates for tasks such as alerting, IVR, surveys, and voicemail, so you can shorten your development cycle. Once you’ve created a workflow in the visual designer, you can modify the code and customize it if you like.
Plivo also provides white glove support to smooth and simplify the experience you have with carriers. For instance, we streamline the process for registering sender IDs, so you can register for multiple sender IDs with varying requirements in the same workflow.
Sending messages to your customer base requires understanding how many phone numbers you need to use to deliver these messages and what types of numbers to use for best results. Plivo provides an application called Powerpack that makes it easy for you to achieve high messaging throughput. Powerpack intelligently selects the best phone number to send from for any given message and formats your messages automatically based on carrier requirements. It can automatically spread out traffic over multiple numbers and improve response rates for your messages by using the same local recognizable number for each person.
For more on how to optimize your customer experience using SMS messaging, read our white paper and learn how to communicate with customers in real time, at scale, and cost-effectively.
