I was looking for a cost-effective and quick communication mode to contact my stock broking agency’s customers. Most of them were medium and low investors and needed constant contact to protect and nurture their investments. The movements in the stock markets needed fast reaction and responses so that profits could be booked or losses curtailed. I used to send e-mails but it was not accessible to all. Calling them individually was expensive and time-consuming. Telegrams were not the answer. Looking for some inexpensive and efficient solutions on the Internet, I came across SMS Country.com, which was offering bulk, SMS and a free Microsoft Outlook plugin to enable sending SMS through PC to customers’ mobile phones. All I needed to do was sign up for a corporate account and download the plugin from their site. The plug added SMS tabs to the Outlook mail account used by my staff. They could configure the plug in to send automated SMS alerts to customer’s mobiles whenever needed. Since they were offering a free trial, I decided to test the service and sent SMS to some of our inactive customers. It worked, beautifully! Testing some more, I sent SMS messages to potential customers who responded with enthusiasm. I was very happy with the results and decided to use the service extensively. That was four months ago. Today, SMS country is an inseparable part of our office. We cannot imagine working without the advantages of SMS messages through SMS Country.com. On an average, my office sends technical & long-term call recommendations to all our clients four times in a day. The messages include IPO alerts, payment instruction alerts, delivery instruction alerts, and trading confirmations at close of trading day. The SMS messages also included shortfall in accounts requiring payments/topups, as well as the latest positions on the currencies, stock markets, forex deals, bullion rates, derivatives positions and money market rates. It took us some time to understand the basics, as not all of us were computer literate or Internet savvy. But the customer support people at SMS country, who answered all our queries patiently, guided us patiently. But we soon learnt the ropes and everyone uses the service like a professional. Besides the service is quite easy to learn and use. What we find advantageous is that we receive delivery reports of all the SMS sent and customers can reply back immediately for us to proceed. I found to my surprise that our customer base is growing fast and we have left some big stockbroker companies behind. Our new customers since the last three months comprise 71% of our client base. Our reliability levels, so vital in this field, have gone up tremendously. Costs have come down substantially, so has the stress levels. The difficulties we face are mainly on account of topping up our SMS credits. The online payment process is quite complicated and sometimes takes more time than is needed. Otherwise, we have no complaints over their service and hope to use more of SMS country.