Why businesses in the Middle East should opt for a transactional messaging platform before it is too late

Messages sent by businesses to customers like password verification, appointment reminders, package delivery updates, service appointment arrival times, coupons and promotional offers are often transactional and functional. These messages become relevant to each customer because they offer privacy and convenience to customers through authentication or confirmation of a transaction. They also help build customer trust in brands as they provide transparent updates on crucial transactions. These are not a given but have to be built with the help of advanced technology used in transactional messaging platforms.

Building an advanced, secure, scalable and feature rich messaging system internally is not a viable option because of the time, cost, and engineering bandwidth requirements. Option B is relying on fragmented systems and multiple vendors. Outsourcing functions to manage multiple channels and maintain and update the messaging infrastructures leads to an unviable and a huge ecosystem of vendors and channels incurring huge costs and engineering effort.

Most companies find that too many cooks are brewing the broth in their transactional messaging system. With too many teams writing the same code in multiple places, their critical alert messaging system is over the place and creating a hinge load on developer bandwidth.

For example, as one team works on the product update emails, another is creating password reset emails, while another team is building campaign alert emails. and so on creating a huge load on developer bandwidth and costs too. Also, with each new campaign for the same product, they are creating new codes repetitively, increasing the time and bandwidth to send these emails, enhancing their maintenance and development cost enhancing it by almost 60 per cent.

Technology makes the difference

The challenge always boils down to developer dependency, go-live time, analysis paralysis from using so many tools and the frustration of leveraging multiple tools for the same purpose.

This is the time for businesses in the MEA region to look for a unified transactional messaging platform that eliminates wasteful exercises like navigating through multiple systems, paying extra subscriptions for top-up software and deploying precious technical resources for routine tasks.

Fortunately, the market now has highly advanced and competent unified transactional messaging platforms that can address these issues. They offer teams the autonomy to set up, edit, and send transactional messages easily, without any developer dependencies. Based on a single API, these streamlined platforms can not only bring in operational efficiency but also offer cost-effective solutions. They are built with features that are powerful enough to instil customer confidence in business and their brands.

Benefits of unified platforms 

• Plug and play: These ready-to-use platforms fit seamlessly with the existing tech stack with minimum engineering effort. The one-time setup API system frees up technical teams’ time as it does not need regular monitoring by the engineering team.
• Channel Fallback option: A built-in channel fallback mechanism automatically routes the messages to other channels when there is a delivery failure. For example, if the message sent through SMS fails to reach the customer, the specific transactional message has to mandatorily reach the customer either through email or push notification. This becomes hard to monitor and enforce when multiple fragmented tools are involved creating regulatory compliance issues apart from technical ones. This is an automated feature in the channel fallback option if, for some reason, the default channel does not work, the message will be sent on the fallback channel.
• Streamlined messaging infrastructure: Consolidated platforms running on a single API offer brands a way to save time, money, and developer bandwidth due to removal of unnecessary dependencies. Instead, teams are empowered to set up and send transactional messages on their own, instantly via customised templates.
• Real-time delivery: Single API-based transactional messaging platforms are built for high speed and reliability. While most platforms in a market promise send times of 30-60 seconds, customers cannot be waiting around for so long for fraud alerts or critical OTPs. Therefore brands must lookout for unified platforms that guarantee send times of <3 seconds with SLAs.
• Unified view: Integrated platforms can analyse all alerts in one centralised location and drive collaboration across multiple functions such as engineering, product, compliance, and marketing. This means keeping a watch on delivery failures and efficiency metrics easily from one platform.
• Audit logs and traceability: When multiple tools are involved, businesses can easily access audit logs and exact copies of personalised transactional messages to maintain regulatory compliance.

The messaging system of an enterprise with a wide range of customers is sending out a clear signal: If you want to reach customers in real-time with critical alerts, it’s best to opt for the most advanced unified messaging platform that ensures efficiency, cost savings, and speedy send time for your brand’s critical messages.