"AT&T's SMS API is a key component in the Intelligent Payment System we created"
— Chas Ramer, Chief Executive Officer at Street Savings
APIs Used: AT&T SMS API
Street Savings Delivers Powerful Mobile Marketing for Payment Terminals
Street Savings uses the AT&T SMS API to help businesses create personalized mobile-marketing campaigns.
Street Savings has been providing effective mobile-marketing solutions since 2006. The company offers its products through resellers, independent sales organizations and agents that sell merchant or credit-card services. Street Savings Mobile Coupons and Mobile Rewards products integrate with most retail credit-card and point-of-sale (POS) systems. With its new solution, detailed below, support is included for terminals enabled with the ISIS mobile wallet technology.
Through Street Savings' easy-to-use products, retailers can increase sales and build loyalty with today's on-the-go customers. To sign up, customers simply enter their mobile phone number into the credit-card terminal or POS system. A text message is sent immediately to complete the activation. Retailers can then send offers to customers for redemption at the point-of-sale, including "set and forget" campaigns or even weather-related offers triggered by temperature ranges. (For example, a restaurant can offer a discount on soup during a winter chill.) Merchants can track the transactions and revenue generated from these mobile offers.
"Our goal is to simplify mobile marketing for small businesses," says Chas Ramer, Chief Executive Officer at Street Savings. "They do not have the time and resources to manage rewards and loyalty programs, so we offer a customizable, turnkey solution."
To enhance its offerings, Street Savings recently began developing its Intelligent Payment System™ to support any method of payment—including credit or debit card, cash, or mobile wallets such as ISIS, which allow customers to pay by smartphone. For this solution, Street Savings sought the most reliable SMS messaging it could find. "SMS is critical to us," says Ramer. "The messages have to go through."
To seamlessly integrate its service with payment processing, Street Savings partnered with VeriFone's PAYMEDIA program to integrate Street Savings' service with VeriFone's PAYware Connect payment gateway, which supports the latest generation of VeriFone terminals, as well as a wide range of ECR (electronic cash register) and POS systems. "We wanted to provide the most sophisticated, easy-to-use solution for small businesses," says Ramer.
"I was impressed with the API platform, and AT&T has a reputation of being easy to work with, so when I heard that it was opening its environment to entrepreneurial companies like ours, we signed up."
— Chas Ramer, Chief Executive Officer at Street Savings
Chooses the AT&T API Platform
In October 2011, Chas Ramer first learned of the new AT&T API Platform at a wireless industry conference. AT&T was about to embark on the beta program for its new platform, featuring its RESTful APIs, built to conform to the Representational State Transfer (REST) web-service design model. "I was impressed with the API platform, and AT&T has a reputation of being easy to work with, so when I heard that it was opening its environment to entrepreneurial companies like ours, we signed up," says Ramer. And because AT&T is a leading wireless provider, Ramer was eager to make sure that its new application worked well on the AT&T network first.
Streamlines Implementation with AT&T
Street Savings began developing its new application in June 2012. The AT&T SDK and the AT&T SMS API made it easy for the company's developers to integrate SMS messaging into its new applications. The development team used the intuitive AT&T API Console that provides quick access to the APIs. "The ease-of-use of the AT&T APIs was impressive," says Jake Hulse, Chief Information Officer at Street Savings.
To ensure its solutions worked well, the Street Savings development team used the AT&T API Platform Sandbox and its suite of tools, which are available to AT&T Developer Program members, to test its application with a live network. The team also took advantage of AT&T's technical support for developers.
Gets Quick Answers to Questions
The development went smoothly, and the close relationship with AT&T meant that the Street Savings team could call on AT&T whenever they had a question. "We got immediate answers," says Hulse. "Between having the tools, the sample code, and the access to support when we needed it, we were able to complete our core messaging development to just 90 days. We could then include it in the VeriFone payment gateway integration and development of the Intelligent Payment System. The result is an effective payment and loyalty solution for small businesses."