Here at Mitto we’ve known since the beginning that our advanced routing capabilities, paired with rapid and high throughput processing, ensure our customer engagement offerings cater to even the fastest growing and most agile of enterprises.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?” is the most common riddle joke in existence. And it is also the most powerful example of anti-humor given we all (should!) know the punchline is actually the simple statement of fact, “To get to the other side.” But the next question should be how did the chicken get to the other side? Did it take the shortest possible route, traversing directly across the road in the quickest way, or in fact do something else?
Whilst Application-to-Person (A2P) SMS is the most powerful channel of mobile engagement today, not all A2P SMS is built equal. Now you’re probably thinking that one SMS is just like any other SMS. To a degree you are correct: the maximum number of characters within, the base technology around processing them etc. may all practically be identical but how content is relayed from its originator to the destination subscriber can and does vary greatly. This is what routing is all about.
Routing strategy is intrinsically linked with product strategy. Products in the A2P SMS sphere are essentially groups of different route types intelligently organized. Routing is therefore the bedrock of any A2P SMS content deliverer’s proposition. It has to be. We here at Mitto have known this since the beginning and our advanced routing capabilities, paired with rapid and high throughput processing, ensure our customer engagement offerings cater to even the fastest growing and most agile of enterprises.
Granted most of us will have been quite literally grounded the past few months but perhaps a more relatable analogy of how A2P SMS routing broadly functions is to take an area most of us will be very familiar with – air travel.
Over recent years, the consistently highest revenue-generating global flight route in the world has been that linking the two highly influential global cities of London and New York. Over $1 billion in annual revenue is generated from this one route alone. A key factor in the route’s success is that it is direct and people are prepared to pay a premium for this. Going direct is more convenient, it saves time, reduces opportunities for delays and is more secure. Exactly like direct mobile operator A2P SMS connectivity.
Roll back the clock a few years and few enterprises took more than a cursory interest in exactly how their content was being routed using SMS to their customers. The lowest price deliverer tended to win the business with few exceptions, deliverer costs kept low by using indirect, often grey routing. Grey routes exploit vulnerabilities in mobile phone networks, risking the security of messages; both their content and the recipients’ details which could have been intercepted, copied and even altered. Often messages were simply not delivered at all. How the market has changed.
Today, enterprises clearly understand the importance of having rapid, secure two-way avenues of communication with both their customers and potential customers. It all comes down to trust. Building and maintaining relationships sits at the heart of this. Hence direct connections have become sought after.
Our Carrier Relations team has been working hard for years to onboarding a stable network of reliable direct A2P SMS connections with mobile operators around the world. This work cannot and will never cease and as more and more enterprises ask for direct routing, this area will in fact continue to gain in importance across the industry. Direct with Mitto really is the way to go.
