Why Send Them?
A welcome SMS message can very simply let the subscriber know that they are roaming. This means that, if they don’t want to incur roaming charges, then they should not use the phone. This gives the operator the ability to say “I told you that you were roaming” and perhaps avoid refusals to pay roaming bills. Depending on the situation this may or may not be enough. You may instead need to consider another solution such as the Evolved Intelligence border roaming system.
Alternatively you could use welcome SMS messages to help your subscribers use their phone more effectively whilst roaming. Not everyone knows how to make an international call, or perhaps may not know how to call local numbers in the roaming country or how to access voice mail. If you use welcome SMS to help them do this, you can boost traffic. Most useful is advising them how to access voice mail. If roamers pick up messages they are usually prompted to return calls. These are usually international calls and therefore highly valuable to you. Of course, if you can afford it, a dialled number correction system, such as the Evolved Intelligence VHE, will deliver a more direct and effective solution.
You can also use welcome SMS messaging to prompt the roamer to make calls. For example you can use a message to suggest that the roamer should call home. This might be even more effective if it is combined with price advice such as for example: “It only costs $5 for a 3 minute phone call home”.
Another good use would be to collect information on customer satisfaction. It can be quite difficult to track the quality of service that you subscribers experience in foreign networks. The recent rise in network congestion has made it even more important to know what is actually being delivered. One direct way of finding out is to ask your customers. When they return, simply send them an SMS message asking them what their experience was like. If a negative comes back, they can simply be called by customer service. You get alerted to any issues. The customer gets the feeling that you really care about the service that you are delivering to him.
Message Types
Messages can be triggered by a number of events. When a new subscriber is seen coming into a network, you can send them a message. This can be your subscriber arriving in a foreign network or a foreign subscriber arriving in your network. Likewise you can send a message when their visit to the network is ended. And so on… For your own subscribers you can also send them a message when they leave your network. You can also welcome them home.
Generally, however, it is seen as bad manners to send messages to another operator’s subscribers, unless you have their express permission to do so. This is because it is seen as interfering with their right to manage their own customers.
Hidden Complexity
Welcome SMS can be a very simple system to begin with. It relies upon a passive monitoring probe to provide the triggering information. This probe can be fairly simple, however it is important to make sure that this is a loss-less probe if the system is to be used for any regulatory mandated service. Making your probe loss-less may not be simple. The Evolved Intelligence loss-less probe, for example, achieves this through a patch to the operating system kernel.
You also need to consider when the message gets sent. If, for example, you have a subscriber that regularly crosses a border (perhaps on a daily basis), he is going to get quite fed up if you send him a message every time and you are going to incur unnecessary costs.
The system needs to be driven by sophisticated logic which allows you to send the right message, at the right time, in the right language and without sending unnecessary and annoying messages.
The probe should detect the arrival, either inbound or outbound, of a roaming subscriber. The service should be triggered by either a voice or a data update location message. The service should then decide what action to take based upon a number of parameters. These can include:
• The roamers location (by VLR, operator, country or charging zone)
• The roamer’s IMSI
• The number of times that the roamer has already visited the country
• The interval since the last visit
• The messages that have already been sent
• The services used by the roamer
• The roamer’s preferred language
It should send messages in different languages according based on the IMSI number of the recipient. It should also be able to use different languages in the same SMS message or send the same message twice but in different languages.
The system should trigger on either voice or data registration… or both. So, for example, you might send a message about roaming data rates when triggered by a data update location message.
So, as you can see, the final solution can turn out to be quite complex!