HDFC Bank texting Indian customers with updates at 4am in the morning

Link: Customers lose sleep over SMS alerts-Chandigarh-Cities-The Times of India

SMS beeps at unearthly hours are known to give rise to suspicions of infidelity, causing rifts in relationships, but a private bank that has been sending transaction alerts to its users seems oblivious to it. It’s not just couples who have been complaining, but the elderly who are woken up from sleep with a start.

I wonder who HDFC Bank are using for their text gateway. This is a brilliant example of where it’s just not good enough to buy a ‘normal’ text gateway. When you’re sending account updates like this to lots of customers (brilliant idea, obviously) it’s critical that they don’t get queued and then sent out hours later. That’s just useless. It makes the bank look like a bunch of slackers with shitty technology. It might not be their supplier; it could be the way they’re connecting to the gateway…

Solution? Get a better, faster, more reliable provider. Someone with good carrier relationships and an excellent back-end — and someone who can help give your traffic priority ahead of bog standard text messages at carrier level.

[A good place to start, by the way? A company like SMS Text News sponsor Clickatell]