Adam Parks (00:00)
Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another Receivables webinar. Today I've got some really fantastic guests and a great topic. I've got Rick Lang joining me as well as Steve Kusic and we're going to talk about text messaging. I mean, look, we all know about text messaging, but let's talk about the strategies behind it that actually drive success.
Just because you know and you've got the communication train track set up in your organization doesn't mean that you've got a conductor optimizing that traffic.
And I think that's what we're gonna really dig into in our conversation today. But to kick this off and for anybody who who's watching who has never been to a conference before and not met Mr. Steve Kusic, Steve, could you tell everyone a little about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?
Steve (00:43)
It's an interesting business. with being brought up into it is daycare, with being second generation. And I actually started in the business at sixteen years old in one week and that was basically I got my driver's license and I started following Monday. And out outside of college, I've been here for forty two years now and just a family business and I tell people my dad made me president of the company because he got tired of signing documents. He made me do it. And that's how... he still got the salary. I just had to do all the work. and that's just way things work. And my father still tells me how I should be doing business in today's world. ⁓ And, he's ninety two. So ⁓ it's a great journey I've been on.
Adam Parks (01:25)
Well, from my perspective, Steve, you are one of those first movers when it comes to technology and you're always on the forefront of thinking about what comes next, which I think ties into a lot of what we're going to talk about today when we look at response codes and some of the ways in which text messaging can really be optimized for an organization. Rick, for anyone who has not seen our other content together, can you give everyone a little about yourself and how you get to the seat that you're today?
Rick Lang (01:50)
Wow. In some regard, I would say that I grew up in the collections industry myself. I actually started my journey in the arm space when I worked with TouchStar Software. At that time, they were a premise based dialer company, and they brought me on board to help them develop the hosted version of the premise based dialer along with what we call TouchStar Connect, which was additional products and services.
So, you know, like voice services, data services and PBX or phone systems. And the idea behind that initial division was we wanted to eliminate the finger pointing between vendors and provide an all-in-one solution.
⁓ That concept was, just something that resonated a lot with ⁓ companies in the industry, because we were providing an all in one solution for all of your communication ⁓ platforms and, you know, single point of accountability and management. That, you know, that's where I started TouchStar, you know, eventually went one way and I decided to go the other. I started a single source telecom in 2007, exited in 2019, and then started working on Pronto Connects shortly thereafter. But I've always been in the arm space, always been focused around technology and providing services that benefit the agencies.
Steve (03:21)
And I will tell you when he started I hate to say single source, I was one of his first clients there too.
Rick Lang (03:24)
That's right. That's actually, you know, I just mean, you when you when you started to talk there, that was the first thing that I thought about was you and I started working together. I honestly I think you were like my second or third customer back then and then obviously, you were the one that really pushed me to get a Pronto going.
Steve (03:46)
Yeah. And my harassment for him has never stopped for like fifteen years.
Rick Lang (03:51)
Never. And people always will tease their kids and say, I have all these gray hairs because of you. I lost this hair because of you. That's my sentiment with Steve. ⁓ I had hair. And I used to look good and be young. And then Steve was like, do this, do this, and do that. And I'm like, yes, I'll do it. Which actually is kind of a good segue if I know you got a ton of questions.
Adam Parks (04:16)
I was gonna say that brings us right into our conversation today in terms of coming together with the evolution of text messaging itself. So before we jump into that, I just want to say to the audience watching live, if you have questions, I am monitoring the chat. So you can drop questions in there and I'll bring it to the team here as part of the discussion. But to start off at the top here.
I thought it would be interesting to talk about SMS versus MMS versus RCS, and we'll call RCS the pipe dream for right now. But what is the difference in the capabilities of those tool sets in terms of messaging, in terms of rails, in terms of carriers? Like walk me through the real differences between the world of SMS and MMS.
Rick Lang (05:01)
Yeah, what I was going to say, you just kind of my segue there is one of the things that I that you know, you'd called Steve, an innovator. One of the things that I've always said about Steve and I and I've said this multiple times to, you know, numerous people just in, you know, conversation, never to Steve, I don't I won't ever compliment him directly to his face.
Adam Parks (05:17)
Never to Steve.
Rick Lang (05:22)
It's the thing Steve is very, he loves to push the you know, the technology, you know envelope right he loves to push it and and the thing about that is you have to right? Like some somebody has to be an innovator and so somebody has to push and somebody has to listen and you know, my role in listening is listening to what his you know, the question is or what the demand is because on the back end of it, there's a business process or there's an operational reason.
And those processes and those reasons, a lot of times will translate to better products, better reporting and refining, you know, Pronto in ⁓ or helping us present Pronto in a new way. ⁓ So to answer your question, Adam, about, you know, the differences between SMS and MMS. Again, this is one of those things where Steve took the, you know, took the lead on it. And just right from the beginning, his strategy was heavily focused on MMS.
And what we saw at the very, very beginning was that there's a balance between the walk a fine line and a balancing act between compliance, right? Like what are the regulatory requirements want? And then, or what are the regulatory agencies want? But then, you know, and then getting somebody to pay, right? And getting somebody to act on your message.
Rick Lang (06:41)
So with SMS, 160 characters, right? And so with that limited content, you can only say so much, but you can only convey so much of a message. And you'd be surprised, I think we talked about this once, 75 % of our overall traffic is SMS, right? And then 25 to 30 % is MMS.
That's still that, not a predominant ⁓ communication path. And it blows me away because with MMS, it really gives you the opportunity to, with the additional characters, if you will, it really gives you the opportunity to create brand recognition, to establish credibility, to convey who you're, you know, who you're contacting them on behalf of. And it just surprised me that so many people don't incorporate that or have that strategy.
Steve (07:31)
Yeah. With SMS, you're so limited in what you can actually say to a consumer. And by this time you say National Recovery Agency or NRA group, a debt collector, there's nothing left. And you put so you put your link in there. The link, depending on how you do it, is probably going to overflow over 160 characters. So you end up paying for double two SMSs. Most people don't realize that.
And then in reality, an MMS message just pretty much costs you triple like ⁓ equivalent to three messages. So if you're gonna put something out there, put something that people can read. They actually know who they're paying. They ⁓ know why you're calling in reference to a bill with the consumer, because the consumer doesn't know National Recovery Agency. They know my client, but they don't know my ⁓ company. If you put enough information out there, you can then get past being like an identities theft phishing type scheme.
Because that's what most people look at. If you look at the average company's message, so dumbed down that you're almost like, Am I gonna get if I touch this link, am I gonna get spammed? And so what I think the average company doesn't look at, they look at cost, but they don't really even understand that their costs are probably paying for it because their messages are too long with SMS or maybe I hate to say they have bad software and their software providers only allowing them to do SMS.
But if you do MMS, you can get it through. Your ROI per message is higher on MMS than it is on SMS. And just a kind of a fact of life.
Rick Lang (08:49)
Yeah, because think about what you're asking people to do, right? You're sending them in that SMS, 160 characters, you're sending them a link and they're like, click on this link and pay me money. And, know, our over the last 10 years, our culture has trained, you know, the workforce has trained people don't click on links. Right.
And so you know, every cybersecurity training that you'll ever go to, whether it's you know, in work or in a community environment, they're going to tell you don't click on a link if you don't know who the person is. And yet, and within our industry, the standard is, I'm going to send this message, which like, you know, pay this link, there's no strategy, there's no, shouldn't just blankly say that, but there should be more of a strategy. People should be taking the time to develop that contact to establish their brand.
That's again, and Steve, I don't want to share like all of your secrets to success, but you know, using an MMS strategy and taking the time to develop and almost create the relationship first before you send the SMS, hey, pay me now type of links. It goes a long way.
Steve (10:06)
Yeah. And my first like five messages out to a consumer are all MMS. Then I'll switch to maybe the SMS if they haven't been successful just to keep on pinging the consumer. But ⁓ yeah, you need to establish who you are up front, which also most people are looking for a straight up ROI for on an MMS message. They forget how much money they're trying to use in MMS message to save money, let's say, versus a reg F notice.
You know, what are you trying to get ⁓ accomplished in that thing. So you have to truly look at what you're trying to do? And sometimes a phone call collects money, but the phone call actually caused the consumer to go back and look at a previous MMS message and pay off that MMS so that you stop calling them. So it's like the link having the link out there for the consumer is a great thing. Cause they don't delete them. They keep around forever.
Adam Parks (10:55)
Well, a brand isn't recognized till been seen five times. So the strategy of sending those MMS messages, establishing your brand before using, let's call SMS what it is, the notification technology. Right? Like that's its objective is to be a notification tool. Going all the way back to our flip phones, right? Because I don't know about you, but I couldn't send a text message on a flip phone. I don't have that kind of patience.
Rick Lang (11:10)
Right. I still use a flip phone. Sorry.
Adam Parks (11:17)
It's because you're in telecommunications and you know better. but you know, when we start thinking about from a a content perspective, Steve, how different is the content messaging that you're sending across those two channels as you're building out that strategy, right? If you're doing five to ten MMS messages, is branding the main focal point or are there other things that you're communicating and testing?
Rick Lang (11:19)
I love that.
Steve (11:40)
No, branding is the main focal point. I want the customer, if they look us up online, they can actually see the same logo. They can actually everything matches up a hundred percent with what's on Google. they can validate who we are, they can actually see, you know, I hate to say our Google score. because guess what? You will not get another section. We you won't get your messages delivered if you have bad reputation, in certain aspects.
But you want them to be able to see everything to validate you are a legitimate company. Especially, I mean, that's one of the main things between behind the Reg F notice. and then you can do so much more with the MMS. You can send out V cards if you want to. You can actually drop the Reg F notice into a PDF versus we actually use customized images that we create internally.
So there's different ways to get out the message, and each way actually goes through different spam filters differently. And so you actually have to be aware of your delivery rates.
Rick Lang (12:30)
There's really two things there that I think that we should do more of as an industry. One of them is, you have to acknowledge and have to recognize that all of the providers have content filters. They're leveraging AI and looking at every message that goes through. So, when Steve mentions the Google score, that's huge, right? It's critical to get in to your overall delivery.
Steve (12:58)
Well, you can't deliver anything on an Android phone without having a decent Google score, especially if you're going through the Wi Fi network. So everybody needs to understand when you're sending a text message, it can actually go through the cellular communication as if you're driving down the road, or if you're in your office right now and you're on your company Wi Fi, it'll actually convert over to a Wi Fi text and shoot through that system.
They actually use two different spam filters and the Wi Fi one is specifically banging up against ⁓ Google score. And so therefore, if you have a good score, you can possibly push through, but not always. I mean, 'cause that spam filter is grabbing everything. And so you actually have to test not only the phones you're sending them to when you're doing your sample testing, but also if you're ⁓ on the Wi Fi or straight cellular.
Rick Lang (13:44)
And the performance is dynamic, right? And I don't think people understand that. I don't think that's understood either is AI you know, AI rapidly changes. And just, moving so quickly that, you know, you have to almost proactively manage your delivery and you have to look at all of these granular aspects of it.
And I could tell you, know, years ago, you know, Steve and I were, you know, we're looking at spam and he was saying, you know, my payments went down on this campaign, my payments were down on this. And I originally was like, it's delivered, it's delivered. And he kept saying, Nope, something's off, something off. And, know, and I'm a person that believes in managing with document, you know, by documentation, cause documentation is black and white. Right.
So I thought, well, I'm going to dig into this just to prove Steve wrong, right? Cause he was so, cause he was looking at his documentation and saying, I see this is down. I'm like, okay, I have to do the same thing. And so then the more that I dug into, to the details and to, you know, the granular reports that we get, the more like, wait a minute, this doesn't add up. we kept digging and digging. And then what we ended up realizing is, hey, if you send a message and it's going across wifi, well, then you're getting this result.
If it's going to an MNO versus an MVNO, you're getting these results. And so it's so granular that you have to manage it. And if you're not going to take the time to get into the weeds and understand all those fine metrics, you almost have to accept mediocre deliberability.
Adam Parks (15:21)
So walk me walk me back through the alphabet here real quick and help me understand the differences. You say it VMO, like help me understand the differences between these paths.
Rick Lang (15:29)
Good point. You have your MNOs, which is your mobile network operators. So that's your AT &T, your T-Mobile, your Verizon. Then you have your MVNOs, which would be mobile virtual network operator, which is ⁓ Google Voice, like Mint Mobile, right? ⁓
Steve (15:51)
Cricket.
Rick Lang (15:52)
Cricket, right? And so they don't have their own cellular, for the most part, they don't have their own cellular networks, right? And a lot of times they're leveraging, you know, a Wi Fi hotspot, but as a hotspot, but Wi Fi internet calling, and then they'll basically subcontract with the other providers. And so they're, you know, like a tier two, right? But because they will rely on Wi Fi Wi Fi, they have different content filters and they treat the messages differently. And so the best example that I can give you is going back to the test that Steve and I were doing a few years ago where he says, my numbers are down.
I said, okay, send me some messages. And I actually told this story to somebody yesterday. So he sends me tech, he calls me and says, okay, I just sent you a bunch of messages. And I said, I got all three of them. And he was like, great, I sent you 10.
And I was like, what? We sent me and so then I'm like, where are the other seven messages? And so, you know, I go through my phone and seven of them were in my spam filter and the only difference, right? same campaign, same 10 DLC, same phone number to me. The only difference was that I was at my house on wifi calling, right? Opposed to not being at my house and, being on the cellular network.
And so my house, I live in the foothills and so we don't have cellular service where I live. And so I've cursed that scenario so many times because so such a pain in the ass not to have cellular service at your house. But here in this situation, you know, it is actually beneficial because all of the messages that he sent to me when I was on wifi calling, they all went to spam. And then the ones that were on the cellular, they actually got delivered and there was nothing, you know, that was the only difference, right?
Steve (17:39)
And the funny part is so when we're also doing this testing, we have one of my short code providers will actually say delivery the carrier. The other short code provider says actually delivery to the handset. So one we know when they gets delivered to the carrier, he might be they might be spamming me out at that level, but at least when I know I'm getting delivered to the handset, I'm getting spammed at the handset level possibly. ⁓ Through the software.
And so we're also looking at that like so you can't just treat two of your, let's say, short code providers, texting tier one providers, the same. So we're actually adding a third on and trying to standardize the codes because guess what? They all use different codes sending all the data back to us. And that's what makes it extreme like you just can't build it out for one ⁓ company. You got to build it out for everybody. And I would also say you can't be successful in this business if your accounts not set up right with the tier one carrier. You know, they need to know you're a debt collection agency. They want have to want to be able to say, we're going to be pushing these messages through. You got to be able to pay actually a premium to a vendor because they're actually watching your messages as well. If you're just looking for the cheapest service, your delivery rate's gonna be squat because no one no one cares.
Rick Lang (18:54)
That old adage, you get what you pay for it just resonates over and over again. We intentionally set up two different providers on the back end because going back to the MVNOs and all that, every one of them reports back differently. They all have their own set of delivery results and error codes.
And so that we ingest all of them and then turn around and provide, you know, the common denominators, but what makes, you've got everybody reporting their own unique, you know, error messages or error codes, but then the way that they reported is different too. So to Steve's point, one of our providers is providing what's called network based delivery. So their delivery stats are based on the network. And then we've got the other provider who is doing handset delivery.
Now, handset delivery is obviously the most accurate because it's actually reporting on the handset, the device, whereas network is more high level. But you have to ingest all those errors, and then you have to really get into the weeds and then almost decipher what is actually happening. And so to give you an example, I know Steve, you want to?
Steve (20:07)
Yeah. Now I was gonna say, but it's so bizarre that you can take AT&T or Verizon, for example, and get different results from the same tier one. Like why are they not the same? Like they have to be like AT&T has to be pushing them through to you. How are they manipulating them different? ⁓
That's the stuff that actually drives me crazy because you can't create one set of rules engines in order to take the data and do it. And what I was gonna also suggest for Rick, if he can explain how T Mobile, the way they treat MMS messages for like a non delivery, because that's the most bizarre one out there completely. So T Mobile's horrible for MMS delivery. So that's where SMS actually comes back more into play.
Rick Lang (20:48)
I feel like this is where we're all getting in trouble. So let's just take undelivered, right? So undelivered is a standard result that everybody is familiar with. That's what most people will look at. And most people will say, why are my messages not getting delivered? So on the backend of undelivered, you have, let's just say 20 error codes that equate to undelivered.
So one of those error codes is, yeah, So you got undelivered and then behind undelivered, there's like 20 or so error codes that all of the providers say these 20 error codes result in an undelivered. So just to give an example, one of those error codes is invalid destination. Okay. So, undelivered there's 20, you know, error codes that, you know, are below that fall into that category. And then one of those 20 is invalid destination. That invalid destination then has its own subset of like error codes. So, AT &T and Verizon, if the end user did not pay their bill. Right? So they're out of credits, right?
AT&T Verizon will say, and the code that we get back is end user out of prepaid credits. That end user out of prepaid credits goes into the invalid destination error, which then goes into the undelivered, right? Now follow that same path. If you send, and to Steve's point, T-Mobile. T-Mobile will not send an MMS message to a short code in that's it has something to do with the MVNO and I don't want to quote it because I'm you know, I don't want to miss quote their error but T-Mobile will take that they won't deliver an MMS message to a short code, you know with an MVNO based on their requirements but whatever those requirements are, it's not the point.
The point is that they then take that error code, push it into the invalid destination, which is then underneath undeliverable. So you have undeliverable with these. And they're totally different.
Adam Parks (23:03)
There's two other layers of granularity that we could be looking at to help us but to help us happened versus this lump together version of it that is more, you know, thumb in the sky. What direction is the wind blowing?
Rick Lang (23:12)
Right. Somebody, they didn't pay their bill, that's not a bad, and that's the other thing. If you're sending text messages to a landline or to a phone number that can't receive text messages, right? Like maybe they don't have a data plan. Maybe they have a cell phone, but voice only. All of that gets lumped in to undeliverable. And so the assumption is that , you know, hear it all the time.
People just assume that undeliverable immediately equals you can tell him a time because I keep talking with my hands. The assumption is that, you know, people just assume that undeliverable means a bad number. And it's not true. It could just be that the person didn't pay their bill. And what you should do is just wait until they get paid when it's you know, date night and they're like, I gotta get in touch with so and so they pay their phone bill and then then you send them the text message.
Steve (24:07)
And then the other thing, so on that, so let's say you take somebody you didn't pay their bill, you hit up today, push it two weeks when you get that error code. And then if they didn't make that number good again, you try it one more time, you push it like two weeks, and at that time that number's going disconnected. And there's no reason to actually put it into a voice call because guess what? They didn't pay their bill, so it's not getting delivered by voice either. So you can actually use it.
Hey, one, then you know, you know, you can't get through to the guy. So you're it's kind of cheaper almost to do a text than trying to even do a dialer call and taking the time to respond to it. And then two, you know the guy has no money. So therefore, you're never going to get paid. So as long as maybe you can get it out on the credit bureau report or something, if you're credit bureau reporting for that client, you just let it sit there because guess what? He's a no money guy.
⁓ And it makes it really difficult. But then there's other things we're doing now through Pronto. We're actually scrubbing every single one of our phone numbers up front to find out who the carrier is. So we know when we're starting to see the error codes what we can actually do to trace them back to ⁓ at a carrier level event. And doing some things like that. It's you know when the problem is if you're only sending out ten thousand messages a day, this is no big deal stuff.
When you're sending out a hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand messages a day, that's when you're starting to see the errors and they become ⁓ you know, they're serious numbers and you have to figure it out correctly. The other part is I hate to say, is your provider that you're doing business with charging you for undelivered messages or not? I think that's a big one that I think most people would be shocked by.
Rick Lang (25:25)
Yeah. And you know what, and that's a whole can of worms because they attempted it, right? And if they attempt it, then they're charging you for it. You made a good point and this is again, this is why I love working with you is you said that if they didn't pay their cell phone bill, they don't have any money, right? And so just think about that.
You know, I'm clearly not 20 years old or, you know, I'm not part of the younger generation, but I constantly see people all the time and they're always like this. They're always on their phone. They're always facing their phone. It doesn't matter if they're driving or not. And I'm, always thinking to myself, why are they always on their phone? Why are people always on their phone?
And, my point is that society as a whole, everybody is always on their phone. So if they're going to pay a bill, that's the bill they're going to pay, right? So if you're sending a message and you get end user out of prepaid credits and you get that response, you know, two times, okay, you know that they're not paying their bill. And to Steve's point, they probably don't have any money.
And so, if they're not going to pay their cell phone bill, they're not going to pay you. And so the point is you can really use SMS or just texting in general. You can use it almost as, a strategy tool to determine, this person doesn't have money, what's my next step? Is it worth the time and energy to pursue them? Is it worth, you know, like take them on a rotation or, you know what I mean? You can use it as to gain actionable insights.
Steve (27:13)
But yeah. You have no money, you have no girlfriend, so therefore you don't need a phone.
Adam Parks (27:14)
Changes your orchestration. Look, but it's more data for the orchestration, right? If we're trying to drive next best action based on performance behaviors, the granularity of these performance behaviors changes the dynamic. Right. This is a whole new way in which you can try and engage with that consumer by understanding what those response codes mean.
Because you know, if it's binary, delivered undelivered versus understanding that they didn't pay their bill or ⁓ whatever ⁓ other responses you're getting at least allows you to make decisions about that account. 'Cause not every account is gonna be a collection, but if we can drive it to a resolution we can stop spending good money to go after that.
Steve (27:52)
Yeah. The one that I will tell you I'm having the biggest headache with, and we have not found a solution at all. Like not even at all is ⁓ people that are on Wi Fi only phones. So they go out to Google, they buy a number for a dollar a month. Their phone service then, let's say in this case where we're talking to where you ran out of credits, they still pay the dollar a month to Google now. Wi Fi only phone. So maybe they go to work, they have Wi Fi service there.
But getting back and forth to work, they actually have no Wi Fi. So when you're trying to send them a message and they're traveling that day, yet your message isn't getting delivered either. And you know, they'll try to attempt it over a couple days.
But if somebody's not running out to a Starbucks or something to get the free Wi Fi, they're never getting your message delivered. And so we're seeing a ton of errors for Wi Fi calls, we believe it they are, you know, for non delivery there is a percentage of the overall non delivered ratio.
Rick Lang (28:52)
The other part of is that that is so hard to track down because even if you take that number and you run it through the reassigned number database, it's still active. It's not disconnected because they're paying that dollar. And then you can obviously look up and see who the carrier is, but because they're inconsistently on.
I guess is the best way to describe it. It's almost like you have to time it just right to get it that delivered. And that's again, we're getting super granular. And I think that's where I think Steve and I probably go too far.
Adam Parks (29:33)
Well, look I don't know that there's such a thing as too far, but I do have a couple of questions that have started coming
through. The first one was about ⁓ T Mobile and it said so will T Mobile send MMS over a ten DLC number?
Steve (29:45)
Yeah, I've had success doing that.
Adam Parks (29:48)
And then the second question that we had was relate well, really a kind of a comment related to the RCS capabilities, you know, kind of dwarfing what we can do from an MMS and an SMS standpoint. But I think Rick, and you and I have talked before about the realities of RCS for the debt collection industry. Can you give us a rundown on what you see what you've seen so far and what your expectations are for the next six to twelve months?
Rick Lang (30:12)
So what I've seen is everybody wants it. It's like, you know, I don't call it a buzzword, but totally. And it is totally sexy and we've got like, you know, Steve, myself and a couple other agencies are in testing right now with it. I'm waiting to see. And actually, Steve made a point earlier about registering your brand correctly.
That's critical because, you know, when we go and we register a brand, whether it's RCS, MMS or whatever, short code 10 DLC, we're a hundred percent upfront. This is collections. This is what they do. And we fight those registration battles on the front end simply because when you do go to start sending, if there is any, you know, any concerns or if there is any pushback from the carriers, you know, we immediately turn around and say, guys, this we told you at the very beginning, this is what they do.
You approve these messages, you know, and we essentially use their, you know, again, documentation is black and white. We literally take that their approvals and send it back to them. Guys, this is the business case we presented. This is what you approve. Why is it a problem now? For RCS to answer your question?
You know, I'm hopefully optimistic. my opinion is that last year when they released it, it was for the Fortune500 companies and they onboarded all of them and essentially proved the concept. So I do think that it will become available at some point for the industry. I know that the RMAI is doing a lot. We're part of the digital communications committee.
And their lobbying for the industry, is really beneficial. And I think that that's what we need to do. But I think that if we create, for us, think that if we create the right business case, if we leverage what we've learned when getting short codes and 10 DLCs approved, if we leverage what we know, if we address their concerns on the front end, we'll have a good chance of getting
people into production and then showing that the industry can utilize RCS in responsible fashion.
Steve (32:18)
So my part that I actually laugh is there's the agencies that are just doing SMS on like want to go to RCS. It's like Yeah, you just jump into it. And so like, what are you guys gonna do with RCS if you're not even playing with MMS at this point in time, with certain types of aspects? So it makes it sense. I mean, will in RCS text really come out like clean and crisp and you know as modern as it is.
But look at all the texts that you currently receive from people. Outside of like happy anniversary and happy birthday, there's barely any RCS text even coming through on my phone at all from anybody. Nobody's paying for it. Nobody has it set up in that respect. But there is some like there is really cool stuff you can do with it.
Rick Lang (32:56)
Totally.
Steve (33:05)
I just think most people don't realize that you're hiring a programmer to program all this stuff. ⁓ It's not just a text message anymore. ⁓ Because it's all digital.
Rick Lang (33:10)
Yeah. And, I guess going back to the, you know, the topic of, MMS, there's so many things you can do with MMS, right? You know, with, our, portal that we just are the, you know, we just released ⁓ a new version of our platform. And one of the things that we built out in that, in the new platform is we're in the new version is we give you the ability to create or to preview how your message or MMS message looks.
So if you want to put your logo at the top, put your text in the middle, put your PDF on the bottom, you can do that. If you want to, you can sit there and play around with the structure and the preview of your MMS before you send it and make sure that it presents correctly. And, you know, you're just putting your logo into an MMS message that I don't see anybody.
That's not like a common practice and it's kind of surprising because it's branding, right? And again, going back to the beginning of the conversation, we're asking people to pay and if you put your logo just in that MMS message, the first thing, because Adam, you said it, brand recognition, it takes five times. If you sent them a letter, if you sent them an email, right? And then you send them an MMS with your logo, the first thing they're going to think is, ⁓ I remember these guys emailed me. I remember I got their letter.
Adam Parks (34:28)
Visual recognition of it. Not everybody's a name person. Some of us you know, recognize faces but can't remember anybody's name.
Rick Lang (34:28)
Visual. Right.
Steve (34:34)
And also when you're doing like an RCS, I mean, if you have a good digital team in your office, they can create almost the equivalent of an RCS message through a really good image that they're trying to push through. So it all depends on what you're trying to do with it without the interactiveness of the RCS. And that we're looking to do some stuff with that's interactive that could be really cool for consumers. And ⁓ you know, we're gonna push the edge of that one.
Adam Parks (34:59)
The interactiveness of it all is really where is what it comes down to. Right? Like I use both an Android and an iPhone day to day and just kind of looking at some of the messaging capabilities as we've looked at the technology, it's there. But then it also is gonna come back to like you're figuring out can I get an SMS into this group or that group. I think RCS you're gonna have to look for that granularity in terms of what kind of device are they using? Is this device RCS capable? And how long till that's ubiquitous?
Rick Lang (34:59)
You just gave me an idea.
Steve (35:03)
Yeah, it has to be a full digital device. I mean you can't use a flip phone anymore. But the good news is the RCS stuff is gonna bypass, I believe, this most of the spam filters. So therefore, ⁓ that's what we're hoping for.
Rick Lang (35:27)
Right. Yeah.
Adam Parks (35:37)
Well How does that come into play when you start looking at some of these other filtration systems? Like just on my I've got Aura, I've got RoboKiller, I've got Active Armor. I wanna say there's probably four spam filters on my phone that are looking at both. I maybe I just get a lot of phone calls. And when you spend a lot of time overseas, they start getting expensive.
Steve (35:56)
No, but if you think of it as branded call you have to look at it like branded calling, you know, from that perspective. ⁓ the RCS is going to give you a version of branded calling. And that's what I'm primarily most excited about.
Rick Lang (36:06)
Yeah, we tested with Steve was utilizing brand new caller ID to bypass and get past the ⁓ iOS 26 updates. Right. And that that's really where that whole V card thing kind of came into play. If you push your V card out, right, it push it inherently, you know, deposits or downloads on the phone. Right? And then, and then, you know, then you send a text message afterwards.
And then, well, I shouldn't say it inherently downloads the phone. With branded caller ID, when you make a voice call, it pushes out the file and it pushes out the contact to the phone first, right? If you follow that up with a text message, it significantly reduces the, you're going to spam.
Adam Parks (37:00)
So hold on a second. Let me make sure that I understood that. So if I was using like a TransUnion branded call display, I outbound to that consumer's phone. I'm ultimately pushing that V card. I'm pushing that contact out. I don't know, or let's say a branded call display tool set. And I'm pretty sure there's somebody from TransUnion watching that will correct me here shortly.
So what I'm understanding though is that the branded call display outbound communication is pushing that contact to the phone in advance. Now that it's there, you're seeing it from a branding perspective and then the probability of the text messages going through without the spam filter because now the contact is in the phone.
Rick Lang (37:27)
So we tested that internally and that was the result.
Adam Parks (37:43)
And that was what you found. Okay. Interesting.
Steve (37:44)
And, separately, Rick, I have that conversation at four o'clock today on doing some more on that subject.
But no, I mean I think when you're looking at trying to get a phone call, you know, through or a text message through to the consumer, you also have to look at who the consumer is that you're doing it. You know, do they want that call? Everybody talks about everybody prefers it. ⁓ well, guess what? If they got a couple of text messages, do they really prefer it and they're not paying?
You gotta and I know we're talking about MMS and RCS and SMS right now, but you really you have to use the full Omni channel. I mean I think there's people that think, hey, let me just send text messages, life will be easy and not that case. You have sure you have other stuff to do.
Adam Parks (38:28)
The biggest disconnect I see is people looking at the rails of sending the communications versus the strategies of orchestrating those communications cross channels.
Steve (38:38)
Yeah. And you know, I'm gonna t mention like you need to look at the text messaging similar to what, you know, ⁓ you may be doing with email. So let's say you're sending out ten thousand emails today. If sixty five percent of are Gmail, you wanna see sixty five percent of your open rates coming from consumers to be Gmail, and you wanna see sixty five percent of your payments coming from Gmail. And if that's not the case, then you gotta look, is Gmail blocking me or is ⁓ if up at eighty five percent, that also tells you then guess what?
Your other vendors are getting blocked, you know, as far as you're going out. The same goes with text messaging. You have to look at having different messages. Is the message an issue or is it the carrier being the issue? Or, you know, in this case, we're also looking at our tier one providers being the issue. and we're getting that granular down to the it to that situation and trying to decipher the error code and then figure out the next strategy.
And a very complex set of actions. However, it's gonna represent ten to fifteen percent of all your messages that you're sending every day. So understanding, you know, instead of sending error after error, you know, in that message, yeah, if you're small enough, it's not going to cost you that much. ⁓ Maybe, but when you start getting larger and you're looking at fifteen to thirty thousand messages possibly falling into that category.
Rick Lang (39:54)
You have to have a realistic view of our industry. Right. I don't know if like, if, know, how aware people are, but if you try and get a new voice vendor and bring on a new voice carrier today, they're the requirements are dramatically different to what they were two years ago. Right. So the, on the voice side, you know, we have to complete know your customer forms. We to do all of this registration very similar to on the text messaging side. So think about it like this, the voice side there, they are reacting to what has happened, which is spam calls and you know, all this, you know, people just, abusing voice, right?
Steve (40:33)
Well, first of all, they don't want collection agencies anymore because of short duration calls. So you have to be also realize they don't want you as a customer.
Rick Lang (40:40)
Right, so the voice providers don't want collection agencies. The mobile providers have already prohibited debt collections, right? And then, know, email is a whole other thing. So when you look at it in that lens, we have to be strategic. You have to get into the weeds and you have to say, what is my strategy here? What is my strategy here?
And you have to be proactive as far as in, you know, how you're perceived online, right? And you have to be proactive as far as your reputation because that reputation is what's gonna get your voice traffic approved and sent. And the same thing goes for your delivery with your text messages and the same thing goes for your email.
What I was saying to all those things, they all translate to your reputation. So you have to proactively monitor.
Steve (41:32)
I'm gonna also say something as far as the industry is concerned. When somebody at any high level of one of the companies that we're using can make a tell their staff at a moment's notice, we're not doing business with collection agencies in 30 days. And that notice could come out at any time. Twilio did it and crushed the entire industry. My comment is use somebody like Rick that has multiple texting providers that are know the collection business.
And have at least backup because guess what? If you go down and you're let's say you're making a lot of your money now off of texting or it it becomes a part of your whole collection ⁓ space with the omni channel, you need to have a backup. ⁓ and whether it be with long codes or short codes immediately set up, you need to have with whoever your texting vendor may be, but you need to have multiple options and like I would tell you I'm good enough friends with Rick that I know I have multiple options with him, but you need to have multiple options. If you know, if you're not with your other vendors, if they can't get to you, you need to you need to go to somebody that can get for you.
Rick Lang (42:42)
Then on the back end, what we do is we configure. We configure the all three providers with we set them up. So if know, Steve's doing X number of volume and then he's played that across three, we configure all three to manage or to handle that volume at total. So like if we you know, if we lost two of them, if we lost two out of the three, we had one provider left.
We've provisioned it and configured that account to manage the entire volume if need be. Right. And so you know, one of those things where like, who would ever thought that truly be like, you know, like, guys, we're done. Like, you know, yeah.
Adam Parks (43:21)
No, look, I mean, it happened in payments. It happened with Twilio, right? Like, it's happened. I feel like maybe it's the post-traumatic stress of being you know, a debt collector, but like this is something that we face every couple of years, right? Like there's always some sort of a cycle of new challenges coming up. As we think about the the text messaging communications, and Steve, it's kind of a question for you, but what is your most controversial opinion?
Steve (44:00)
Now my most controversial of it is so when you look at like when you make a phone call and a consumer, you know, answers the call or doesn't, you have different different codes that you can rely on. When you send an email, like we can tell if a bot's opening up the email or if the consumer's opening up the email or both are in actually most cases. and so therefore we can get very good data coming back from that.
Texting, I don't get the data that I necessarily like. And that's one of our biggest ⁓ things and just making good decisions off of it. And so you just gotta figure out like you're working on the ninety ten issues with some of these ⁓ things. You'll never be able to dive down deep enough and really have a good clear understanding unless you know some engineer is coming in to your office from Verizon to actually tell you what they're doing.
But I think any day they change the spam filter changes the rules engine. So ⁓ we're not fixated on trying to fix everything, but we are fixated on trying to like you know take care of the 90-10 to 80-20 issues that we run into with errors with ⁓ Rick because ⁓ it just drives me nuts with and but I would tell you with email, I got it down to a science. You know, one of those things. You just and that's the difference with texting, it's unknown.
You do not know if you're going into the spam filter. ⁓ There's no way to even test it. Like I can test my emails right now and test to see where they're going. There's no way then to figure out how to fix it if it's not. I mean, we do a lot of trying, don't get me wrong, and we tweak some stuff, but you constantly have to fight a battle of the unknown with what you're trying to do to make it work.
And I will tell you, I unfairly pick on Rick on that stuff because I'm specifically really focused is T Mobile delivering our traffic today or Verizon because we ran into a major problem about a year ago ⁓ in the Pennsylvania mid Atlantic area.
Verizon was spamming everything ⁓ that we were doing and we were trying to make sure that our phone, our text messages weren't getting spammed and we were able to prove they weren't getting spammed. So believe it or not, text messages were out collecting phone calls because we couldn't get the text mess or the phone calls through.
And so you have to what most people in this industry do not realize is their texting phone numbers, their email address and everything else is a asset. Your asset is your that brand. But your brand is also made up of those consumer phone numbers of that that you have in the system. You need to not beat the, I hate to say beat the crap out of a consumer to the point where they spam you so often, which ruins your brand.
Everything that you do has to be in balance. And I think that's where the person that doesn't understand it just doesn't understand, respect it you know, respect your integrity of your company first and then and let it collect the money. But don't over try it because it'll you know be the bully with text messaging because it just won't work.
And the unknown is what we were talking about before, where, you know, you've got different, everybody's got different reporting error codes. And so we can only, you know, you can only go so far and, get so much data. And, know, and then, uh, you almost reached this point of the unknown where it's like, you know, cause then that comes down to like, was saying before network based reporting versus handset.
Rick Lang (47:22)
If everybody did handset reporting, then you would have that. You would know the unknown. a lot of them, just network-based reporting is a standard. So that means once it goes to AT &T and once AT &T says received, then it's like you missed that latter half of what is generally filled in by the handset-based reporting.
Adam Parks (47:28)
Mm-hmm.
Steve (47:36)
Mm.
So s certain
Adam Parks (47:47)
So Rick, let me ask you this. So for somebody who's watching this, I'm gonna ask you if actually this is kind of a layup, but I think it's also important for those that actually want to take action on what we've talked about today. So what's the first step in a journey of a thousand miles? So somebody who's been leveraging SMS messaging, they haven't really started going down this path of truly understanding the returned codes.
What's the first step in that journey of activating this other part of the text messaging strategies? We've gotten into some detail today, but like what's the first step?
Rick Lang (48:29)
As far as them, as far as them like moving to MMS, is that what you're saying?
Adam Parks (48:33)
Yeah, you wanna start moving into MMS, you wanna start leveraging some of these codes, you wanna start improving your text messaging strategy. Like what's that first step if you've just got the rails of SMS set up and that's what you've been focused on? Could be both you.
Rick Lang (48:36)
I would, I would say…
Steve (48:43)
While Rick's thinking about it, I'll give him the layup. The layup is can their software vendor, whoever they're doing business with, handle it? I would say some of them can't.
Rick Lang (48:52)
Yeah.Which is surprising, but you're right. And then, and then I would say, you know, reach out to us, I'll give you some great templates and then see if you want to present that data, know, and I don't think MMS is that difficult. I think it's misunderstood because it really just comes down to the cost.
And you know what I would say actually the first step, what I would do is I'd run like a 30 or 60 day test. You know what I mean? Like you don't have to abandon your SMS strategy altogether. I'd say let's do a 30 or 60 day test where split your traffic and just, you know, adopt this strategy, send out, you know, some MMS messages first with, you know, with, uh, some, credible content, do some branding and then see what your ROI is.
See if it's worth if you're, I mean, think about it. If you're spending, let's say, five grand or three grand, whatever it is today on SMS, and you take 20%, 30 % of that volume and you triple the cost of it, but then it increases your payments by triple. I mean, that's well worth it. You would have it increases it by, you know, 20%, probably worth it. Totally.
And it all depends on what you're really trying to accomplish. Like when you're calling the guy today, ninety percent of the people will answer that comment. I was trying I want a payment out of the sending that text message. Well, great. I'm actually trying to work the account and I know I need to put so much work into this account to get a consumer to pay at a certain age of debt. It's just like, ⁓ wow, they they just want to pay me.
They're it just a doesn't work that way. I mean yeah, if you're doing like late stage debt, which I do a ton of it, you gotta put a l you gotta put a little money into it and ⁓ be persistent. And sometimes, you know, the persistence is what pays off.
Adam Parks (50:31)
Well, gentlemen, this has been an awesome discussion. Honestly, I don't think I've laughed this hard on a webinar in many years, or probably since the last time I did a podcast with Rick. That was pretty good. I let off with this is my spirit animal, Rick. So I really do appreciate you guys coming on, sharing your insights. I know this is something that you're passionate about.
You guys both spend a lot of time building the strategies around these tool sets, Steve activating them and Rick building the tools behind it. But I appreciate you guys coming on, sharing your insights with our audience, which has been very engaged throughout this discussion.
Rick Lang (51:13)
Thanks, Adam, I appreciate it.
Adam Parks (51:26)
We had a lot of really good questions from folks that I know and respect here. If you have additional questions you'd like to ask Steve, Rick, or myself, you can leave those in the comments on LinkedIn. We'll be responding to those, or you can go share the replay next Friday when we post it out to YouTube and bring some more people into the discussion as well. So we really do appreciate everybody today. Thank you for your time and attention, and we'll see you all again soon. Bye, everyone.
Rick Lang (51:54)
Thank you guys.
Steve (51:54)
Thank you and good day.
