About USSD – 3 / Question on LinkedIn / Continued
On Thursday 2 weeks ago I have posted the following question on LinkedIn:
What stops you from using USSD services?
I have gathered 10 13 15 answers by Monday Thursday Monday (Novosibirsk time). Of which two three four people (who were prompted, and have received an explanation) said they are not familiar with USSD, even though the question is posted in Telecommunications section of LinkedIn’s Q+A. It will be (with the latest stats) – 27% of answers.
I will prepare a more elaborate answer to Murad Mamedov’s comments about protocols and USSD and about signaling overload and USSD.
In this post I wanted to pay attention to Gaurav Jandwani (Business Head at leading e-commerce company) and Bhupesh Sehgal (Head – Value Added Services at Lifetree Convergence Ltd.) commenting about “complexity in accessing USSD” and transactional nature of USSD (vs. store+forward nature of SMS).
Good points, thank you! Seems to me, however, that “complexity” of accessing USSD for consumers is nothing more than a novelty of the concept (“difficulty of remembering if * comes first or #”, “cryptic string of nos with “#” and”*” as part of the string – I find it cumbersome to remember”). With time the difficulty will be gone. For instance, in Russia, balance check is routinely done through USSD (*100#) so even my old folks can do it now (unlike SMS!).
As to the differences in comparision to SMS, design of a USSD service eliminates the store-vs-display problem: SMS is included as an option, therefore all vital info like cricket scores are sent to one’s phone as SMS also. However, access to the service, instead of tapping 3 times for C, then tapping 3 times R, then tapping 3 times I, not speaking of all the manipulations one has to do to initiate a new SMS and send it, and then delete the corresponding “Received OK” message if any, is done by a simple 5-symbol phone call to a USSD number (*111#, for example). That’s, by the way, how most of our end-user services are designed: SMS are sent with a help message in the beginning of a USSD session, and all vital information like show times for a particular movie theater are sent via SMS, of course (yes, we have a popular movie show-times USSD service!).
As to another comment about complex pricing – this can be taken care of by the design of the service and corresponding VAS platform.
Here in the US very few users have ever heard of it. It’s only uses here are for the usual phone settings stuff and to annoy people with prepaid sims.
The first use is fine and needed. The second not so much. The US introduction to USSD messaging is in the form of a balance message that is sent to a phone after every single transaction on prepaid sims.
So you send or recieve a text you make or recieve a call you use data. Every single transaction triggers a balance notification message even if the transaction doesn’t change the balance.
Now the problem. That pop up message shows up on the phone and you have to dismiss it before you can do anything with your phone. It is very very frustrating.
I am working at learning what I can about S60 so I can hopefully find a way to get the phone to automatically dismiss the on screen USSD messages. Any help there would be greatly appreciated…
So at least in the US with how the USSD system has been introduced I don’t see it ever being a viable communication platform as it was intruduced as an annoyance. Besides most people here can barely use their phone let alone remember and use *#0000# commands. Not to mention that the companies would have to create a new billing system (can’t give anything away for free here).
Dear Robert,
Sorry to inform you that you cannot dismiss USSD messages.
In the part of the world where I live (Russia), even though I do occasionally get FREE SMS ads, I do not get PUSH USSD messages. One has to initiate a USSD interaction in order to get a USSD message.
Ivan