Communicating with a large customer base via mobile messaging

The widespread use of mobile phones has opened up new ways of communicating with large numbers of people. Companies can use personalized SMS messages as a fast and cost-efficient means of providing customers with information and receiving immediate feedback. In this paper the design, development, and use of a mobile marketing platform is described both from a technical and a user-experience point of view. Solutions are presented which allow fast and reliable sending of large numbers of messages. A central event processing mechanism has been implemented which reacts to incoming messages and processes notifications received from external systems. Timer-based services perform regular tasks like sending informative messages to customers and business users of the platform. Customer data is managed with automated registration and deregistration, data exchange with external systems, selection of destination groups based on user attributes, and the collection of a comprehensive history of customer interactions. Intelligent supervising tasks which automatically recognize exceptional conditions like unusually large message quantities within a specified time frame are performed in the background. An administrative web interface of the platform with comprehensive message monitoring functions allows taking appropriate action in such cases. After describing this and other unique features, experience from development and practical applications of the platform is presented which allows evaluating the project and summarizing the lessons learned during five years of development and deployment of the platform.