Why go with TxTStream?

We have recently had a number of clients question the costs of our SMS service when compared to the cheaper options in the market, and why they should be using a premium service when the cheaper options appear to do the same thing. Below is a summary of the key benefits of using TxTStream:

1. TxTStream uses direct connections to Australian and New Zealand telcos. These are expensive but our experience over 15 years has shown us that this is the only viable approach in achieving reliable delivery, delivery notification (received at handset) and reply rates.
2. Direct connections are limited by the telcos themselves. Cheaper connections are available via so called ‘grey routes’. However, grey routes invariably provide unreliable delivery with frequent intermittent issues and very unreliable delivery reporting and at times a non-existent reply path:
   
• Grey routes are often throttled, or in some cases shut down completely, and unfortunately this behaviour is intermittent. Different telcos have different policies regarding volumes and grey routes. For example, Virgin Australia may accept no incoming grey routes for a period, while Telstra may be allowing messages through below a certain volume.
• Grey routes will almost inevitably have issues with delivery confirmation to handset even if the message was successfully received, making it very difficult to recognise or diagnose delivery issues or overall delivery rates.
• Grey routes are typically implemented by routing via several countries and/or off-shore telcos. In itself this leads to increased error rates due to the hops involved. More specifically, messages are often held up for an indeterminable amount of time (sometimes hours) at an intermediate telco, and in some cases, the batch may then be expired.
• Due to the many hops/telcos involved in grey routing, the off-shore provider will invariably switch routing when issues arise, making it almost impossible in some cases to diagnose any issues. Coupled with this, the "from" number can change without warning, confusing recipients.
• Due to the many hops/telcos involved, the payload of an SMS text, particularly a long concatenated text, and what is deemed an acceptable character within a text, can change. Some routes have a 140 character restriction rather than the normal 160 character restriction resulting in lost text or characters within a text being replaced, intermittently.
3. TxTStream uses multiple routes to local telcos thereby allowing us to be fault tolerant with automatic fail-over. We also implement a store and forward policy, whereby in certain circumstances, we will queue texts until we can establish reliable delivery.
4. Duplication of texts within the SMS texting world can be an issue. Often (and again, more likely when grey routes/many hops are used), it is possible to get partial or repeated batches of texts between either the client and TxTStream, or between TxTStream and the telco. TxTStream’s systems take care of this with most access methods by eliminating any duplicate submissions even when an entire batch is received repeatedly.
5. One of TxTStream's differentiators is our ability to provide replies via email and more particularly batched non-delivery notifications. Without these, and without reliable delivery in the first place, it is impossible to attain an accurate measure of who did and did not receive a particular text and any subsequent action that needs to be followed.
6. TxTStream can, and often does, provide customised solutions to clients.
7. TxTStream has adopted a post pay, single rate model. This simplifies billing greatly and allows us to provide a number of billing models for different scenarios. Most often, cheaper suppliers implement a pre-pay tiered billing model increasing the risk that the service will be shut off completely due to lack of credits. However, the most difficult part of pre-pay billing under some models is that each telco in a particular country may require a different number of ‘credits’, making either direct billing or on-billing or monitoring credit usage an extremely time consuming task.
8. TxTStream’s client portal (www.txtstream.co.nz My account login) allows clients to monitor senders email addresses, volumes and also to look-up and download text activity.
9. TxTStream implements sophisticated 24/7 internal and external automatic monitoring for systems and delivery metrics. This allows TxTStream to take quick action when issues do occur and resolve those issues prior to them affecting our clients.
   
   

At the end of the day, TxTStream provides a package of services tailored to suit our client’s requirements whilst implementing delivery percentage rates in the high 90’s.

Our past experience has demonstrated that using cheaper routes and options, whilst attractive theoretically, is impractical in a real-world business situation and inevitably counter-productive as the amount of time required to solve and diagnose issues (which often cannot be resolved) quickly negates any benefits from a cheaper direct cost