With consumers continuing to buy into wireless services, “push” and “pull” solutions are coming to the forefront as a way to provide information to consumers and provide additional revenue streams for both carriers and businesses.
But, thanks to wired telecommunications use of unwanted telemarketing, the trick for the wireless industry is finding the right balance between the perceived aggressiveness of pushing information and the potential limitations of letting customers pull what they want.
Yopa Inc. thinks the middle ground will be what it calls intelligent push. With the release of its Yopa Push Platform 2.0, enterprise customers can implement a push solution onto its existing e-infrastructure backbone enabling intelligent push of any requested information in voice or text form to any device, wired or wireless.
“Unlike point products for mobile enablement that convert Web content for wireless browsing, or simple alerts whose core competency is the delivery mechanism, Yopa addresses more strategic needs involving personalization and shaping and content, coupled with the ability for instant response,” explained Sunil Sanghavi, president and chief executive officer of Yopa. “This full-circle capability is where the opportunity for true profit lies.”
Analysts have noted the navigation limitations inherent in wireless devices will foster the need for intelligent push technologies.
“Companies must unburden business partners, employees and customers from finding information on their Web sites, and automatically deliver the right, requested information to the right people at the right time,” said Kelly Quinn, senior research analyst at Aberdeen Group. “Push fills this need, and is exponentially more important as wireless takes off.”
Yopa said its service allows companies to create and send personalized, requested information to recipients when they want it. Messages can be triggered by any set of conditions specified by the requester, including scenarios involving several different sources of data.
“Personalization is key in a push system,” said Pradeep Tagare, founder and vice president of product development at Yopa. “Customers don’t want to be bombarded with information or they will just turn the service off.”
Yopa’s platform consists of Yopa Request, enabling businesses to set up and deliver personalized and prioritized information; Yopa Act, enabling message recipients to actually interact with the information requested; and Yopa Promote, enabling personalized marketing and messaging between an enterprise and its shareholders.
Tagare noted the Yopa Act portion of its platform is the key component because it allows customers to react to messages sent to them, such as purchasing an item the consumer is interested in as soon as it goes on sale. This is the money-generating potential businesses are looking for.
Companies can also generate reports showing the effectiveness of promotion campaigns based on parameters such as messages looked at or click-through rates.
Yopa said the platform is available as either a hosted service or a software product. The company said it expects to host many of its customers initially but will see more companies implement the software model in the future.
