Sometimes it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite the plethora of unlimited long distance calling plans (both on landline phones and on mobile phones) and extremely easy access to calling cards, being able call someone collect is still needed.
While this convenient billing feature is old hat to landline calling, it has proven troublesome for mobile phones. Because mobile phones are increasingly replacing landline phones, the inability to place collect calls to mobiles had dramatically reduced the number of collect calls overall. With today’s announcement by 3Cinteractive about the immediate and full scale launch of their patent pending Text Collect™ service, that is all going to change.
Text Collect™ combines Interactive Voice Response, SMS and Premium SMS (PSMS) mobile billing, producing the only service that allows collect calling and operator services providers to complete collect calls to mobile phones.
According to David Ellerstein, 3Cinteractive’s Text Collect™ General Manager, “Revenues from Text Collect™ have grown more than 150% per month since January. The trial produced solid, detailed statistics concerning settlement rates, bad debt ratios and customer service inquiries. All are performing better than our initial projections for the product.”
Text Collect™ is the mobile industry’s only patent pending premium billing application for collect calls. It offers a risk and fraud management system and a real-time purchase receipt via text message for the person who accepted the collect call.
At first glance this seems like a “no big deal” announcement, but then I got to thinking about what would happen if I were in a position that I really, really needed to reach someone and the only way to do it was by collect call. If my family didn’t happen to be at home by the landline what would I do? And at least we still have a landline phone. If we were completely mobile for our phone access, not being able to call collect feels a bit like not having 911. TextCollect™ is a valuable service.
