An automobile major in India wanted to run a mobile campaign for rural markets. The key challenge was how to seamlessly communicate with existing as well as potential customers for its tractors division. Owing to its extensive reach, the company opted for a mobile medium and adopted a voice SMS service—an online platform through which it would upload a voice file and a mobile recipient and broadcast the message.
The voice SMS platform enables a complete-reporting mechanism to check how many customers listened to the call and the response gathered. This helps in future campaigns, besides enabling communication in local and regional languages with farmers across India. As a result, the company's voice SMS campaigns increased the user response to the communication campaign by 90 per cent.
The automobile major is one of the many customers of mVaayooa, a web-based end-to-end enterprise mobile messaging service developed by IMImobile, a Hyderabad-based technology infrastructure and services provider, on its patent-pending DaVinci Evolved Service Platform. The platform provides a unified environment to create, deliver and manage a wide range of innovative, revenue-generating mobile data, voice and video services.
Currently, 30,000 registered enterprise customers across various industries like consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, education, automobile, retail, banking, financial services and insurance sectors are registered with mVaayoo. IMImobile plans to push its Voice SMS service to all the registered users, as well as in the open market by the end of this month.
“In rural India, if you push an SMS, the response is bad, compared to a voice SMS. Rural people don't know what an inbox is, and many of them cannot even read the text SMS in English. So, we believe voice can be a better option for people to directly hear what a person wants to communicate in his local language,” says Vishwanath Alluri, chairman and chief executive, IMImobile.
mVaayoo provides a simple interface which can not only be used by people familiar with technology but also by branch managers and franchisee owners. For instance, if a bank wants to carry out a promotional voice campaign across the country, the local branch manager can simply log on to mVaayoo , record the voice message, and in that language, upload the contact base and dial it. The first call comes to the branch manager and if he is satisfied with the message, the system sends it to bank customers across their respective zones.
IMImobile currently processes 5.5 billion SMSs, 5.5 billion downloads, 18.2 billion caller ring-back tones, tune plays and 2.2 billion outbound dials a year. The company, which has 450 content partnerships, covers over 700 million subscribers, including 21 million subscribers on voice services, across 70 operators in 59 countries. “mVaayoo is just the beginning. Taking a cue from the Global System for Mobile Communications Association’s standardised initiatives like the open mobile marketplace and OneAPI, we would roll out new services shortly,” says Alluri.
