Nominated
Excellence Award: Messaging Services
As we have been nominated by WorldPlay for bulk messaging services, we would have to assume that the information pertinent to their nomination would be around this service specifically. In this regard, SMSPortal delivers a highly available, geographically resilient SMS platform catering for any and all business use cases, from marketing to two factor authentication services, terminating messages daily to almost every country on the globe. Part of what we believe is our advantage is our in house built and maintained platform, which provides our customers with a feature risk basket of products built around SMS as value added free services. Our customers demands are typically the requirements around a zero downtime (SMS has become such a key part of communications that this is probably the single most important part of our offering), flexible (our customers want to build new integrations and flows whilst still using many legacy integrations), secure (particularly relating to GDPR and POPIA recently, but also from a best practice perspective). Effectively, our customers want SMS to operate seamlessly with as little friction between themselves and their own customers that they wish to communicate with, and SMSPortal strives constantly to be problem solvers for such experiences.
We note that motivation mentions the latest developments in rich communication services – SMSPortal have actually built an RCS integration, but unfortunately in the absence of a commercial offering from the MNO’s, this product is consigned to waiting in the wings. In the mean time, the humble SMS is still an incredibly powerful tool to reach what is a mobile first market. As a result of RCS being unavailable at present and of uncertain commercials, SMSPortal have built other rich VAS into our SMS offering, such as our Landing Pages product (a free to use mobile webpage builder with a drag and drop interface) and our URL shortening and unique click tracking (very much like Bitly for Enterprise, but at no cost and with an improved security footprint as no additional API call needs to be made to a third party service outside of South Africa in order to shortening and track a unique click on your URLs). These products however are all viewed as VAS by SMSPortal. Ultimately, we believe we are an excellent choice in the markets we operate in due to our security (we are one of a very short list of ISO 27001 certified SMS providers that are certified throughout our business), our flexibility (there are hundreds and hundreds of bespoke product integrations through customers which unfortunately, without their permission, I cannot share), our reliability (we believe we run one of the most “open” cards incident notification and outage history applets in the market, with every single outage available to any customer or potential customer through our webpage) and our scalability – we process hundreds of millions of messages per month in South Africa, and importantly to WASPA, we are still committed to the fair treatment of each and every consumer in South Africa, with robust solutions for opt-out, blacklist/DNC checking along with our willingness to participate in the process of each and every complaint WASPA receives.