Mining the value of text messaging in the contact center
by Mike Sheridan, 25 August 2011.
My travels brought me to South Africa this week for customer workshops. It’s not surprising that here, as in other parts of the world, the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies such as social media has had contact centers scrambling to add functionality and figure out how to adopt a multichannel customer experience strategy.
Facebook and Twitter have been receiving the vast majority of the attention, in part because of incidents that have gone viral. In the rush to integrate these channels, many companies have overlooked the potential of text messaging to engage customers in targeted ways. As a result, they could be missing valuable opportunities.
On a basic level, it all comes back to devices, in this case mobile phones. It’s no secret that mobile phone adoption has continued its rise: according to Pew Research, more than 8 in 10 U.S. adults now have a cell phone. Penetration in other countries has outstripped the United States. In South Africa, where Internet connectivity is only available to 23 percent of the population, mobile phone penetration has reached 95.3 percent. As
these stats show, mobile phones aren’t just the most popular communications device, they’re often the only option for people to connect with the world.
As a result, consumer behavior is changing. Mobile phones have become the new Swiss Army knife: communications device, social organizer, window to the world (through social media), ATM card, and, in the near future, personal shopper.
This last application is already happening, and widespread adoption is right around the corner: in April 2010,
Juniper Researchforecast that nearly 50 percent of mobile subscribers around the world―across both developed and developing nations―will use their mobile phones to pay for goods and services by 2014. To put that into perspective, that same year more than half a billion people on the Indian sub-continent will make mobile payments.
Progressive companies across a range of industries have already added text messaging to their customer outreach arsenal. Southwest Airlines uses texts to update customers on flight delays, and the pharmacy chain Rite Aid notifies people via text when their prescriptions are ready for pick-up. Even restaurants have jumped into the fray by replacing those annoying buzzing pagers with software that sends a text message to diners letting them know their table is ready.
In the contact center, collections groups, for example, are beginning to use text messaging to improve callbacks from customers, with varying results depending upon the company and country. For example, I spoke with a customer in the United Kingdom that used text messaging for one campaign and saw a 40 percent improvement on callbacks. Meanwhile, another customer in South Africa revealed that text messaging isn’t viewed as an immediate or personal communications channel and so is largely ignored. Certainly, the realities of mobile phone penetration will compel all companies to reassess their views on text messaging.
It’s not hard to imagine companies reaching out to a delinquent customers by text message and receiving an m-payment moments later. Now is the time for companies to integrate text messaging into their contact center and establish this channel as a regular—and effective—means of communication.
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