Text Messaging Featured Article

When it comes to retail these days—whether online or brick-and-mortar—customer engagement is the stuff that dreams are made of. More specifically, the stuff that dreams of runaway success are made of. When the customers are engaged, the customers are paying attention, and eager to come back time and time again to shop with that particular store. But getting customer engagement can often be difficult, as its creation is composed of several components that all need to be firing to at least some degree to generate that engagement. Some new developments, meanwhile, suggest that text messaging may be just what's needed to spark up the process.

Increasingly, companies are turning to the idea of using text messaging as a means to better connect with customers, and make said customers take a more active interest in the companies in question. For instance, OpenMarket (News - Alert) recently offered a new service in which it provides text-enable landlines as well as toll-free numbers specifically for enterprise messaging throughout much of North America. OpenMarket's general manager, Jay Emmet, offered up a note of explanation as to what was behind the move, complete with research to back up a clearly growing demand.

A recent Harris Interactive (News - Alert) poll, titled appropriately enough “The High Demand for Customer Service via Text Messaging” showed that 64 percent of respondents preferred text messaging, and 44 percent on top of that would sooner send a text message rather than stay on hold. That alone would be telling enough, but throw in the results of a Forrester (News - Alert) study that said 86 percent of enterprise users planned to bring in short messaging services (SMS) and that 70 percent considered SMS to be the number one mobile technology around, and it was clear that the research backs pretty much any move into SMS.

Throw in the fact that OpenMarket currently processes better than a billion mobile messaging interactions monthly, and counts over 400 global enterprises—including four out of the top 10 most respected global brands worldwide—and it becomes clear that OpenMarket is part of a very large movement, one that's very heavily focused on text messaging. Nuance (News - Alert) Communications' general manager of proactive engagement solutions, John Pierson, noted “By working with OpenMarket, we can enable companies to use their existing landlines and toll-free numbers to send and receive text messages and provide more meaningful interactions between mobile customers and businesses.”

Indeed, it's fairly easy to see why text messaging would build customer engagement, and the biggest reason is right in the name. When someone receives a text message, that user has to pull out a device and interact with said device to see what the message is, and can then choose to follow up or ignore as needed. Plus, when it comes to consumers getting in touch with businesses, text messaging is a rapid means to both initiate contact with and respond to, making it fit more readily into a consumer's busy life. That's valuable, particularly for customers who don't want to spend a lot of time on hold, which can happen, particularly during a business' busy season.

Whether it's used to promote goods and services or as a means to step up the pace of interaction between company and consumer, the end result is still the same: text messaging can be a great way to boost customer engagement. It's not a magic bullet solution, of course—it needs to be part of a larger overall program—but those who put it to work will likely find little to complain about.