Thousands of texts a day, zero support tickets: Hovership runs delivery notifications on Telnyx

Hovership is the technology layer for companies that move physical packages: a system of record for tracking numbers, a mobile app for drivers, and the modern delivery experience, down to ETAs, that customers now expect.

"A lot of delivery companies' software is kind of antiquated," said Nick Sirago, CTO of Hovership. "We rebuilt everything in more of a modern stack." The notifications that stack sends ride on Telnyx.

Three boxes to check

When Hovership went looking for a messaging provider, the list of requirements was short and strict. "We were looking for competitive cost, deliverability, and ease of integration," Sirago said. "We evaluated a couple different providers and found that Telnyx just kind of checked all those boxes for us."

The team ran a proof of concept on the SMS API before committing. "We sent out a couple of test messages and found that the deliverability was great," he said. The feedback on each send turned out to matter as much as the sends themselves, because Hovership texts whatever number arrives with the package.

"When we go to text a phone number, we don't necessarily know if that phone number is going to be valid, or if it's going to be a landline. It's just the phone number that we get from the person sending the package," Sirago said. "One of the things that we found really useful was how Telnyx will respond and say, oh, this is a landline. And so we can blacklist those."

The migration that pricing paid for

Part of Hovership's volume has run on Telnyx for close to a year. The rest ran on Twilio, and that is now changing.

"That transition is happening right now. Just this week, we're moving a bunch of volume from Twilio over to Telnyx," Sirago said. "The biggest reason is cost. I think that both solutions are reliable. We didn't have any deliverability issues, but Telnyx was significantly cheaper."

The comparison that settled it was not a discount. "What we found is the Telnyx standard pricing was basically the same as what Twilio was looking for in a one-year contract," he said. "So that gave us great pricing and a lot of flexibility." With the first tranche of volume showing no reliability issues on Telnyx, the company felt comfortable bringing over the rest "at a fraction of the cost."

The support story is that there isn't one

Asked for a moment when the Telnyx team went above and beyond, Sirago came up empty, and meant it as a compliment.

"We've never had to reach out to the Telnyx team. Everything just kind of works," he said. "We hooked our system into it. It's all automated. When an event happens in our system, we send a text message automatically. As long as we keep our account topped up with money, the text messages keep flowing. And I've never had a reason to open a support ticket."

The next conversation is a phone call

Delivery generates repetitive inbound calls the way it generates outbound texts, and that is where Sirago is looking next.

"One thing that we're exploring right now is using Telnyx for our customers to be able to call into our customer service, and using Telnyx AI agents to handle those calls," he said. "In delivery, we get a lot of repetitive calls, like adding delivery instructions. Something that would be great for an AI agent to handle." The work is exploratory for now, with testing underway.

All you can ask of a text provider

"Telnyx, in my opinion, is a first-class provider for our use case of sending text messages," Sirago said. "Telnyx has perfectly gotten the job done for us. Every text message that we've gone to send has gone through. I've never had a reason to open a support ticket. The cost is competitive. Ease of integration was there. It's been all that I could ask for in a text provider."