LCO Financial Services reduces costs and boosts deliverability with short codes and TrueDelivery

The Challenge

LCO Financial Services discovered that their customers weren’t getting many of the SMS messages they were sending. This was more than a mere annoyance, as the messages often included necessary information, like account status, that was essential for customers to see.

Assessing the problem, LCO Financial Service’s leadership team decided that their current messaging partners weren’t providing the best technology available, nor was their customer support helpful. Additionally, these partners weren’t aligned with the community-minded business’s values and priorities.

Switching to a new text messaging platform seemed like the obvious choice. On top of the platform search, there was still the problem of major carriers miscategorizing their messages and preventing them from reaching customers. And with the generic-looking 10-digit long codes that LCO Financial Services was using, customers were sometimes ignoring the messages that got past carriers’ filters.

“There’s plenty of focus and energy put forth by businesses to be able to fully identify their own customers,” says Eric Reamer, COO of LCO Financial Services. “But I think it’s equally important for your customers to be sure that they’re actually communicating with their lender, and not a bad actor.”

There had to be some way to build more trust with customers and ensure that messages were received. Because simply switching to a new text platform wouldn’t magically make these issues go away.

“It’s just another safeguard,” says Reamer. “The tool allows us to make sure that what we’re doing today isn’t causing us any unnecessary headaches tomorrow.”

The Solution

LCO Financial Service had heard good things about TrueDialog, which led Reamer to visit our website. Right off the bat, our pricing transparency was a welcome sight. After diving deeper into the site, he found some educational resources that introduced him to new messaging strategies he’d never even considered.

Intrigued, Reamer decided to give us a call. Immediately, a senior stateside customer service rep answered the phone. It was in those conversations that LCO Financial Services learned they needed a dedicated short code. These five- or six-digit numbers improve deliverability with carriers and are more recognizable for customers. Rather than randomized 10-digit numbers, they are professional-looking sequences that lend credibility the moment they hit cell phones.

“TrueDialog genuinely demonstrated interest in our unique needs,” recalls Reamer. “The onboarding team accurately outlined and supported us through the short code provisioning process. They ensured we were operational within the expected timeframe, and I call that a win.”

While using short codes immediately improved LCO Financial Service’s deliverability rates, there were still those pesky spam filters to worry about. Fortunately, TrueDialog offers a new AI-powered text message deliverability scoring tool called TrueDelivery that allows businesses to fine-tune their messages and avoid snags.

“When generative AI was released to the public, we quickly began working on a way to harness its power to identify messages from reputable senders that may be incorrectly marked as spam and making suggestions to correct them,” explains John Wright, CEO of TrueDialog.

By analyzing hundreds of millions of text messages, TrueDelivery leverages those insights to review text message content and scores likelihood of being caught in the carrier’s spam filters. LCO Financial Service’s teams now enter their messages into the tool to quickly spot potential problems before they send the campaigns out.

“It’s just another safeguard,” says Reamer. “The tool allows us to make sure that what we’re doing today isn’t causing us any unnecessary headaches tomorrow.”