With a plethora of communication apps available, one service that will live to fight another day is SMS messaging.
Today there are an estimated 913 million unique users of over-the-top (OTT) messaging, with traffic of OTT messaging already surpassing SMS. However, with 6 billion global mobile users, core communication will still be underpinned by SMS, as the most reliable and ubiquitous service globally.
When it comes to generating revenue, SMS still rules the roost and will do for the foreseeable future. Therefore, it is important for operators to continue to exploit their existing infrastructure as pressure from competitors is driving down their revenues.
To keep connectivity, operators should ensure that mobile users are still able to send and receive SMS messages regardless of how much credit they may have. Globally, 75% are prepaid users, who can typically exhaust their account credit some time before their usual recharge at the end of the month.
Operators can have approximately 10 million messages per month for which they can never guarantee the revenue. This equates to millions of lost messages and millions in loss of revenue globally.
The challenge for operators is to find the balance between enabling prepaid customers to continue messaging without credit while still generating revenue. The answer is to try and keep everyone connected – even when credit is low or no go. Collect SMS and Sponsored Collect SMS services are examples of highly effective mechanisms for reviving revenues.
With a Collect SMS service, if a user is out of pre-pay credit, they can ask a contact to accept the charges of their SMS. If the contact agrees, the message can be billed.