SMS is smart biz tool...

Imagine this: Ten sales executives working for a leading daily approach ten large companies to sell an advertisement for the front page. Since only one ad can appear in that space, the executive who clinches the deal first will have his advertisement appear. The nightmare for the sales manager will be all the ten executives coming back after selling the ad for the same place on the same day — or all of them calling him to confirm if the slot is still open.

What is the best way to handle this? If you answered, “By using the latest software on an advanced smart phone,” you would be wrong. For, in spite of evolving sophisticated technology, the humble SMS is still important for sales force automation (SFA), says Vinay Agrrawal, MD & Founder, UNICEL Technologies. As he points out, “an SMS-based solution is handset-agnostic, OS-agnostic and service-agnostic.”

What this means in the scenario mentioned above is that the sales executive who sells the order for the ad placement just sends an SMS to a central server, which, in turn, marks the slot as booked and then sends an SMS to his boss and all the other executives saying that the ad slot is now taken. This means that his colleagues in the field, realising that the ad position is taken, will not try to sell the same slot on the same day.

In a way, it is interesting to see the SMS hold its own in this day of smart phones, which can run massive applications. The growth of smart phones has been accelerating in recent years and a recent survey by Accenture predicts that consumer purchase rates for smart phones are expected to rise by 26 per cent, while the sales of the traditional phones are bound to come down by 56 per cent this year. This survey was based on usage and spending on 19 different consumer electronics technologies among over 8,000 consumers in eight countries, including India.

But the growth of smart phones need not translate into a greater usage of applications for sales force automation on such smart phones.

Agrrawal says that if such an option is adopted by a large company, then every change in the business logic needs to be updated on the server-based client and on every phone-based application. “This process in the long term is frankly illogical and a waste of resource. With an SMS-based solution, changes in business logic only need to be updated centrally.”

The different models of smart phones in the market also requires the IT department to come up with specific versions for each hand-phone OS.

“With the advent of multiple phone providers and OS versions for smart phones, any enterprise application must also need to be made compatible with all OS versions and platforms. Only then will it make business sense for an enterprise to invest in it. And with rapid upgrades, patches and versions becoming the norm, upgrades to handset-based applications will become a cumbersome process. An SMS-based solution, on the other hand, will continue to be the most effective, de-facto platform to develop and deploy applications,” says Agrrawal.

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