Short Message Service (SMS)

By Tim Passios,
Director of Product Management, Interactive Intelligence

Do you remember when accepting emails from customers changed call centers into contact centers? Way back in the dark ages of technology, about 1996. Since then it seems like contact centers, and enterprises in general, have been forced to accept new avenues for customer interactions on a consistent basis, with varying degrees of success.

While voice is still the dominate player for interactions, more and more text-based technologies are gaining ground. Contact centers and enterprises alike have started to use these media, both for customer interactions and to provide valuable tools for their work force. Short Message Service, or SMS, is one tool that’s become more common in organizations of all kinds, for customers as well as employees.

Until recently and primarily in contact centers, SMS was treated as an extension of email, to give agents a way to interact with customers who wanted to use SMS. However, there were several barriers to truly incorporating SMS into the corporate infrastructure, with proprietary networks, modems and agreements with SMS brokers posing most of the hurdles.

As a result, sending an email to a cell phone number, and letting the providers deliver it as an SMS message to the customer, was standard practice. But while customers might have been satisfied, contact centers weren’t realizing the full benefit of this other media type. Especially now with the explosion of mobile devices and remote worker applications, the need for organizations to revisit SMS outside of the contact center is even more important.

Today, plugging in SMS to the corporate network is becoming easier. Gone are the modems in the telecom rooms, and in their place are standard TCP/IP connections to the SMS brokers. Gone are the proprietary tools to build interfaces between SMS and other applications, replaced by standards such as SOAP, HTML and others already used elsewhere in the organization. Also gone are email front-ends pretending to be SMS interfaces. In their place are desktop clients purposely built for SMS-based conversations.

For the contact center, the benefits of doing SMS the right way are easy to recognize. As its own separate media type, the same metrics applied to voice, email, fax, and other interaction types can now be applied to SMS. Messages can be dropped into an ACD queue right beside phone calls and emails. Reporting can separate SMS from other interaction types. Supervisors can even monitor and track how their agents manage SMS conversations, just as they would other media types.

Moreover, outbound contact centers are increasingly treating SMS as a separate outbound touch point to their customers, applying the same rules they would to an automatic outbound dialing campaign. And just as outbound contact centers are able to provide the customer a way to speak to an agent during an outbound phone all, the same capability can be handled with outbound SMS messages. How? Remember, SMS is just another media type in the contact center at this point, and therefore as an inbound reply, can be routed based on skills or customer data to the correct agent, just like a phone call.

Also, many organizations are seeing the value in SMS outside of their contact center. With the mobile workforce growing daily, and with a wide variety of mobile devices in the hands of mobile workers, SMS applications can be a common interface into the corporate network.

Once thought of as a social tool for the younger generation, how many of you reading this have sat in the back of a meeting room, unable to talk on your cell phone, all the while carrying on a text conversation with a colleague? Now what if you could use SMS for more than just a conversation?

Send a simple SMS into your network with items such as “FP 555-1212”, “SS Gone Home”, “CS Bill Smith”. At first glance those might seem a bit cryptic, but in one organization if an employee sent the above SMS messages, three things happen: their office phone is forwarded to ‘555-1212’, their presence status in the corporate directory has been set to ‘Gone Home’, and a return SMS message was sent to their phone displaying the ‘Current Status for Bill Smith’. All of that without ever calling into an IVR, or even having any special software loaded on their mobile device. Sending s single SMS message did the trick.

Before you dismiss SMS as just a quick way to send a message, look around your organization for other ways to use a technology that already exists for your employees and customers. As in inbound avenue to your current contact center, an outbound option to get your sales or service information pushed out, or as applications to help out your mobile workers, SMS can fill in some gaps you may not have realized before.

Tim Passios is Director of Solutions Marketing for Interactive Intelligence, Inc. and has more than 18 years experience in the contact center industry. Interactive Intelligence is a leading provider of IP business communications software and services for the contact center and the enterprise, with more than 3,000 installations in nearly 90 countries. For more information, contact Interactive Intelligence at [email protected] or (317) 872-3000.

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