A Four-Step Guide to Making the Most out of USSD
Seek to enable quick, real-time interaction with your customers over their mobile phones? Recognize the potential in USSD apps, think they could do wonders for your business yet don’t know where to start? Here are some quick steps you need to take to quickly and efficiently implement USSD communications.
1. Look for a provider with trusted partnerships with MNOs
A provider directly connected with telecoms, one with deep, in-house knowledge of telecoms technologies and a history of successful USSD projects, will make sure your USSD sessions are stable and grant you excellent coverage – all over one single connection!
2. Find a partner, not just a provider
From a technological standpoint, service providers can offer various levels of expertise and support. Acquiring short codes, dealing with registration and setup can be time-consuming. Your technology partner should be able to do all the legwork – talk to operators and regulators so you don’t have to, save you the time it takes for your USSD service to hit the market, and ensure all the flexibility you need regarding the service. If you do business globally, make sure you insist on consultancy and 24/7 support in multiple languages.
3. Get an easy-to-use front-end app builder (or API), test your apps prior to deployment
As each business has its own challenges to overcome, you’ll want to build custom apps to handle exactly what your business needs. This is quickly done with an easy-to-use menu builder and web-based GUI for easy creation of customized menus and services so make sure it’s something your service provider includes in the package.
Developers should be able to connect over APIs to enable USSD communication for any enterprise platform, offering seamless and more customizable integration options. Making the most of the testing environment is also one of the keys to building a successful app. This gives you the possibility to conduct bug-fixing and make sure that everything is running smoothly before putting your app into production.
4. You’ll need stats
USSD has many great features, but for it to really make an impact for your business you need to be able to track and analyze statistics. Knowing app usage and session length helps you build the best, most engaging models of communication and its fantastic response rate when used for surveying means you’ll have you have an easier time getting that all-important feedback – feedback which you can quickly filter, analyze and build on with our analytics.
