OpenMarket – August 19, 2015
In the consumer world, news that Apple is considering having voice messages automatically converted to text would be convenient; especially for all the millennials who don’t ever want to check their voicemail. As Pew Research Center has pointed out, voice as a preferred channel is waning, while texting/SMS is growing. In 2012, only 26% of teens talked daily with friends on their cell phones, down from 36% in 2009. Today, nearly 100% of adult mobile phone owners use it for texting.
In the business world, some major brands are outright abandoning voicemail. Last year, Coca-Cola shut down their voice mail in favor of texting given the demographic shift of its workers. As a former product manager in a company who spent ten years making voice mail systems, even I can see the beginning of the end for voice messaging as the preferred communication channel, especially on mobile devices.
What I wonder is why should companies embrace “voice to text” as an add-on to their existing contact center solution or corporate communications systems? Wouldn’t they be better served if they invested directly in texting solutions as part of their company-wide communication strategy to engage with both customers and employees? This article’s quote is a prime example: “We purposely designed it to have bad customer service,” said Joe Gagnon, chief strategist of Aspect, a Phoenix-based company which markets customer-service solutions such as IVRs. “We made it bad on purpose.”
The article describes how they are adding texting into their contact center solution. Again, this is representative of a bolt-on solution. I view established contact center solutions as mostly voice centric. While you can add texting to them, at some point, a business should consider re-imagining their contact center solution with a digital one that was built initially with social media channels and texting as the central channels for customer engagement. Incidentally, this coincides nicely with potentially adopting SaaS-based contact center technology for cost savings and dynamic scalability.
With the consumer love affair with SMS and the millennial effect on mobile communications, now is the time to re-imagine your future with texting from OpenMarket. Contact us for more information.