Platforms of all sizes are beginning to implement phone verification as a means of spam and fraud prevention. Not only is it highly effective, users are also much more likely to complete the phone verification process than they are to verify their email. After all, 95% of SMS messages get opened within 3 minutes. That makes phone verification a very efficient means of verifying your users. But, how can you implement it? Plivo is one option on the market.
What Is Plivo?
Plivo offers a voice and messaging services to help business owners and app developers reach their audience. Plivo describes itself as not only reliable but also easy-to-use and feature-rich. Whether you're a small business or an enterprise, Plivo promises a simple interface from which you can deploy SMS and voice functionalities for your app or website.
The main idea behind Plivo's services is increasing engagement and communication amongst your audience. With Plivo's SMS service, you are able to quickly and dependably deliver texts to your customers with the use of SMS short codes.
If you already have a call center, you could use Plivo to scale up. If you don't yet have a call center, you can use Plivo to accomplish your goals at a lower price point. Others use it for general marketing and branding purposes so that they can directly connect with customers.
Send Texts Using SMS Short Codes
Plivo is a communications platform and it is completely capable of delivering SMS to your customers. The base rate starts at 40 text messages per second and goes up from there. This allows you to send out messages to thousands of customers quickly, with little delay.
You can also send text messages with the use of SMS short codes. These are numbers that are short and easy to memorize. These short codes will appear as the sender's number when customers view your messages on their phones. Their shortness and high recall make them great for marketing.
Enjoy Fast, Two-Way Communication
Some examples of how you could use this SMS sending service include sending one-time-password (OTPs) for verification purposes. You can also use the sending service to invite customers to a sale or get them to join a contest. In other words, this service is setup for promotional and marketing purposes so that you can directly message customers.
However, it is not just one-way communication. As a Plivo user, you can also get text messages from your customers in response to the messages you send. This is important for multiple reasons. First, it allows you to increase interactions with your customers and get instant engagement for your marketing campaign, promotion, survey, or contest.
Plus, Plivo allows your users to text one another without exposing their own private phone numbers. This is ideal for ride-sharing apps, dating apps, and any case where you want to offer group chat or the ability for two users to get in touch with one another.
In turn, this helps you build a community of interactive and accountable individuals who happily and regularly return to your service in order to engage with the members of your application or community.
Setup Conference Calls
Plivo also offers calling capabilities. You can setup conference calls using Plivo's conference app. The feature utilizes Plivo's Application API, letting you assign a number that people can dial to join in on your group call. This is a convenient way to setup your conference calls.
Cost-Effective Call Center Solutions
Finally, the other feature of Plivo is their call center functionality, which allows you to connect the call center software you already use or your current phone system. This enables you to make and receive phone calls through Plivo. In turn, Plivo will store logs, recordings, and billing information within the platform. It supports multiple carriers, including
Plivo functions also as a call center solution. Users can integrate their existing call center software or phone system with Plivo. As a result, they will be able to make outbound calls and receive inbound calls using the platform. Call recordings, call logs, and even billing information will get saved on the platform. In addition, Plivo offers support for many carriers, including: Cricket, MetroPCS, Sprint, T-mobile, and Verizon.
Pricing
Plivo is truly meant to be scalable and affordable regardless of the current size of your business or sending list. That's why they offer a pay-as-you-go price structure. How much you pay gets based on how many text messages you want to send per minute or how many calls you make/receive.
Regular SMS messages start at $0.0035/minute and you can receive them for free. You can purchase a number starting at $0.8000/month.
If you want to use short codes to send SMS, you can do so at $0.0040/minute. Receiving is still free. The quarterly fee for renting short codes is $3,000 (for three months) if you opt for random short codes. If you want vanity short codes, the rental fee is $4,500 (for three months).
Alternatives to Plivo
Plivo is far from the only SMS provider on the market, so making your decision always requires some due diligence and research.
Why Not Plivo?
The primary reason why your business may think twice about using Plivo is simple. Like most SMS providers, it's regional. There is no single SMS provider that can offer a 100% deliverability guarantee. Depending on the networks they run on, providers will always struggle to reach some part of the world. And that means missing out on some of your customers.
This is what makes RingCaptcha stand out. Instead of locking into just one provider who may or may not be able to reach all of your customers, RingCaptcha is able to bring extreme reliability by brining multiple platforms, including Plivo, into one service.
How RingCaptcha Works
RingCaptcha sends through multiple providers, including Twilio, Infobip, Nexmo, MessageBird, Cequens, Bandwidth, and Plivo. By doing so, RingCaptcha is able to offer every customer a balance between price and reliability.
With RingCaptcha, you get to take advantage of a diverse list of providers without locking into just one. The number of providers also ensures the highest deliverability rates thanks to auto followup, Dial-forHelp, AI Assist, fallback routes, and other mechanisms that run behind the scenes every time you send out a campaign.
With a singlet API set, RingCaptcha also enables you to reduce downtime while enjoying high availability and the security of redundancy. Plus, the single API endpoint also protects you from phone number denial-of-service (DOS), resource exhaustion/SMS flooding, and Sybil attacks thanks to AI and heuristics that analyze one-time-password (OTP) requests.
RingCaptcha's Features
RingCaptcha is primarily built around providing SMS/voice and OTP services. With RingCaptcha, you can accomplish many things for your app or business.
In the case of an app, you can push download links directly to a user's mobile device using RingCaptcha's service.
You can also use RingCaptcha to verify the contactability of users of your service. Be it a shopping app, ride-sharing, or any other peer-to-peer (P2P) community that requires quick and timely communication with users, RingCaptcha verifies that you have a means of reaching them.
Verification through RingCaptcha is also important for building a trustworthy community, whether it's a forum or membership-based application. Verified users are more accountable and help in building a strong, valuable community. On-boarding them with RingCaptcha verification will enable you to prevent duplicate accounts and minimize automated account creation as well.
Additionally, you can use RingCaptcha to retain users overtime. With occasional text messages, you can get a short message to users that they are extremely likely to open. Compared to an email or push notification, users are very likely to read a text message.
Finally, one-time-passwords (OTPs) are easily assigned through text or voice using RingCaptcha's services. This makes it easy to re-engage users who have gone absent for some time and are trying to log back in. It makes the process of resetting their password and regaining access as easy and fast as possible.
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