Our customers have been having amazing success using our text messaging platform to generate phone calls. The following graph shows the number of phone calls made during the 8 hours after a typical SMS broadcast.
As you can see, the response rate is extremely high, but also incredibly fast. This is great when you want to flood phone lines or play a recorded audio message, but doesn’t work very well when connecting to a live operator. For example, when important legislation is on the table, tens of thousands of phone calls are made, sometimes to a single number (say, the White House). This overwhelms the operators and sometimes even the switchboard. Not the best result if you’re really trying to have your voice heard.
When setting up your next mobile messaging campaign, it’s important to think about the action you’re trying to get people to do. For some use-cases, such as generating phone calls, it makes sense to throttle your messages and slow things down. Maybe by a few hours, or maybe even over the course of a few days. Remember to keep in mind local business hours and time zone differences. When you use Message Throttling, customers get all the benefits of combining SMS and voice applications: high response rates, quantifiable results and analysis, and real-time legislative lookup, without the overwhelming spike of calls in the beginning.