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Messaging services to boom: Unicel

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE: Enterprise Messaging Services (EMS) is the recent buzzword among companies keen on leveraging the mobile phone to roll out new services for their clients/ employees.

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According to Vinay Agrrawal, Founder CEO of Unicel, “It is a new age effective medium of communication. It is a new breed of communication from consumer to consumer. With the rise of social networking sites a lot of enterprises have recognized the need for communication media.”

The major benefits customers see with the services are to increase customer acquisition and retention and increase business agility, said Agrrawal in an interview with CIOL.  It is also a cost-effective way of reaching out to lakhs of people in second, he says.

Having started as a carrier –grade solution, Unicel provides enterprise messaging  and virtual number services  (short coded premium messaging) by partnering with a cellular service provider.  The messaging platform can connect to any application in the world to any OS, says, Agrrawal.  Companies also use the service to streamline pick and drop for employees.

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The product involves a one –time set up fee, which varies with the level of customization required and monthly maintenance and support costs.

Companies can also use messaging services to maintain SLAs by addressing problems without delay, says Agrrawal.

Messaging services also comes with its share of hindrances which mainly due to aggregators not maintaining quality as mobile marketers do not clear databases and comply to the DNC(Do Not Call list), but we help customers scrub databases, says Agrrawal.

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Referring the case of a consumer lighting client, the Unicel messaging platform was used to among the sales groups on the field to generate area-wise / region-wise information.

Says Agrrawal, “There is a lot of cost saving involved when this (messaging platform) is used in the ERP for user login in the sales automation module. If a company has 150 people all of them need not login –the application interacts with the ERP on a single connectivity and updates ERP with the information.”

Apart from sales force automation, messaging services could also find good use to address public grievances and criminal helpline like the ‘911’ in the US, fleet management in the logistics industry. The healthcare industry has started using the platform for appointments, cancellation and medication, says Agrrawal. A mobile based healthcare solution could transform the healthcare industry, he says.

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Unicel also has its platform embedded in a popular bank (name with held) to send out collection messages and to report traffic patterns.

Even the hospitality industry can use messaging services to enhance customer services, says Agrrawal, citing an example of an innovative usage of the platform in the Hotel Leela Palace Kempenski in Bangalore where the staff uses messaging to communicate when a guest checks in instead of the walkie-talkie.