Congratulations to Chris, Commercial Manager AsiaPac Region, who is February’s Employee of the Month. Luckily enough, Adam our CTO was visiting the Esendex Australia office this week so he could hand over the (very heavy) award in person. Note – a patriotic pic the left of Adam.

Chris was nominated by the Management Team as despite being many thousands of miles from Head Office he has always sought to challenge the status quo: particularly in looking at new pricing models and sales initiatives.

He’s always interested in the business’ performance and profitability and has a keen eye for detail. This keen eye was fundamental in resolving some business process issues at the start of the month, so thanks Chris! Enjoy the award!

Well they’re all describing the same thing – users can send an SMS message to a handset, to either a landline number or mobile phone, and have the message read out over the phone by recorded message.

Something hard to comprehend is that Voice SMS has been available for several years.  So why now is it becoming more popular?  I guess this could be because of several reasons…. the increase in mobile penetration, the overall acceptability of SMS, the realisation that Voice SMS has additional benefits over and above SMS ?  These are just a few points to think about.

At Esendex, we have seen many uses for Voice SMS.  Hospitals, pharmaceuticals and chemists use Voice SMS, to send to high risk patients for dosing reminders.  In this instance, when messages are particularly important, SMS to voice is a fundamental feature because you are able to confirm with the “acknowledged” status that the message has been listened to.

At Esendex, we have seen a large take up in Voice SMS by debt collection companies. We have a client who began using SMS to voice, at the beginning they were sending thousands of messages each month, unfortunately for us, it has been so successful in collecting debt that they now only send a small proportion of what they had started sending as they no longer need to send follow up messages.

There are a variety of reasons why you might choose Voice SMS over SMS. To name a few,  it could be that you provide services to people who are partially sighted, blind or elderly and therefore find SMS to voice a quick and easy method to communicate information?  It could be that the message you need to send is quite long? (Text messages are charged in multiples of 160 characters)

The key factors to think about with SMS voice messaging is the speed of the message and the retry costs.  If this is something that you are thinking about, then my advice is to check the speed that the messages are read, if they have an Australian accent,  whether or not there are automatic retries on the account and are they free?

If you are an existing customer and would like to try Voice SMS simply visit your account to enable.  If you don’t have an account the please sign-up for a free trial – It would be great to hear what you think!

Let’s start at the start, what is a Virtual Mobile Number? Generally speaking mobile numbers are attached to a SIM card, which we put into our mobile phones. Virtual Mobile Numbers, or VMN, are mobile telephone numbers that aren’t attached to a SIM card, so don’t go anywhere but exist within the network.

A virtual mobile number is an 11 digit number that allows you to receive SMS back to the number you sent your SMS from. Yes in most cases you could supplement the originator with your own mobile number, however the replies will go back to your mobile, and whether that’s scalable for your business is then I guess you need to decide.

Many of our customers offer 2-way SMS services to their customers, employees and suppliers as they can see the benefits of getting replies directly to their SMS account. In fact, many start with a send only SMS service then move on to a send and receive SMS service later on.

Web SMS providers do different things, such as offer dedicated virtual numbers, which just means you’re the only company using it. Alternatively they will suggest a dynamic virtual number which means that every SMS message goes out with a different number as the originator than the last.

Here at Esendex, we offer dedicated virtual mobile numbers. We feel that dedicated virtual mobile numbers have a number of distinct advantages over dynamic virtual mobile numbers.

You effectively “own” the number, so you can use it for advertising and to publicise it to your staff, customers and clients. With dedicated virtual numbers you can be confident knowing that your replies are getting through, as only respondents to your SMS business campaign use that number. Recipients will also see the same number every time so they know who the message is from.

Our prices for our VMN’S are $25 a month and SMS replies are free. Get in touch with us at sales@esendex.com.au and we will add a 2-way SMS messaging facility to your Esendex account straight away.

CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, is Australia’s national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world. They approached us last year as they were looking to add SMS functionality to a project of theirs  – The irriGATEWAY project.

The irriGATEWAY project, helps irrigators finely tune their crop watering to match the weather and their crop’s development stage and all communication is done via the Esendex SMS API. (more…)