Summer has well and truly landed. People in northern Europe, unused to real heat, are experiencing record high temperatures. This trend will no doubt continue in future years. Great news for air conditioning installers and ice cream vendors, not so good for others. What has not changed is the perennial question of what to do with the family over the rather protracted summer vacation period.
Household budgets are tightening and for many the days of actually being able to spend multiple consecutive weeks away have ended. Periods of true vacation, real downtime, now tend to be shorter but more frequent. In addition, an increasing business travel macro trend in many places around the world is work-life convergence, meaning people are no longer trying to balance work and life as two separate entities. A survey from Great Hotels of the World revealed earlier this year that 75 per cent of respondents had extended a business trip for pleasure. The majority (56 per cent) were joined by friends or family. This all means increasing opportunities.
The global hotels market alone is on track to be worth well north of USD 200 billion come 2025, growing at a CAGR of 4.6%. Accommodation service brokerage companies like Airbnb, HomeAway, Expedia and Booking.com are all seeing strong growth and the wider hospitality industry (restaurants, bars etc.) is likewise seeing real knock-on benefits. For those of us deciding to take a ‘staycation’, a few well-earned days of rest at home, food delivery options have simply exploded. The annual market for those globally is USD 100 billion now and growing fast. This all does not mean though that business is easy.
Competition is huge. Companies are having to chase additional revenues by diversifying and enhancing service levels. Take Booking.com as an example: you can now also book flights, hire cars and airport transfers with them. Booking.com were one of the original hotel booking websites but saw they needed to be able to upsell. And all of this can be done from within an app.
Apps are becoming a critical tool in any organisation’s engagement toolkit. Built and used well, they enhance customer loyalty and maintain an open communications channel to customers. Content pushed through (Push Messaging) has to be of consistently high quality though and subscribers need to be sent offers they value, all at a frequency that has to be tightly managed so as not to become too intrusive.
Brands need to be able to continue to delight clients over the long term and companies have seen that relying on Push Messaging alone cannot be expected to achieve this. For optimum results, other channels such as A2P SMS, Email and OTT need to be brought into play.
As per the Chinese proverb ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’, any organisation’s first job where their App is concerned is to actually get clients switched on to using it as fast as possible. So conversion. This is where one-time passwords (OTPs) come into their own.
OTP generation algorithms typically make use of pseudorandomness or randomness, making prediction of successor OTPs difficult. This all helps with the security side of things. The most common delivery mechanism is A2P SMS simply because text messaging is such a ubiquitous communication channel. On smartphones, one-time passwords can also be delivered directly via mobile apps. Enterprises have options. The speed of OTP delivery is absolutely critical though.
Enterprises looking for the optimal app verification solution provider need to be confident their vendor can manage any number of simultaneous transactions, all in an instant. With security at the heart of everything we do, you can be confident that in Mitto you have the right partner for any and all requirements you may have.
