So what's an SMS and how can it help your business?

An SMS is an acronym for Short Message Service - it was originally developed for telco engineers to communicate with one another so that they didn't need to make mobile calls for small things.

Initially it was thought that it was a technology that was too hard to use, and wouldn't have any commercial value to the telco's customers - that's why just about everywhere around the world when it first came out it was free, that's right free.

A former telco engineer once told me that the network he worked for had a PC on a small table in the corner of their office was the server for SMS, and you'll probably find that was the case for most telco companies - there was little invested in hardware because, well they didn't expect it to take off.

So now text messaging has taken off, and is forever increasing - for adults between the ages 18 and 35 it's the most preferred method of communication between them and company's they deal with, with expected usages going into the trillions of messages world wide - in fact it has been and continues to be the most popular form of messaging in the world, beating out email, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and so on.

So the kids love it, Twitter loves it, but why should your business love it? Well, let me say two things from the outset - first, SMS messaging should never replace a phone call that's worth making the phone call in the first place - i.e. a salesman has got the customer to the point where they feel comfortable asking for the business, would they use SMS instead of calling or going around to see the customer face to face? No, of course not. Secondly, remember it doesn't matter what your company does or what it provides, ultimately all businesses, including yours whether you want it to or not, is a sales company, and without sales you don't have a business, just a group of people that hang out together.

So why use SMS within your business? There are two generic reasons that apply to pretty much everyone, it's a cost saving both in the cost of making phone calls, and secondly the labour cost of making the calls.

But it also offers consistency within the business - one of our clients, who is an accountancy firm, and who has been using SMS for the last number of years say that in the past before using SMS, that they would call some clients to remind them about appointments, but quite often they'd either forget to call after the customer had asked for the prompt, or they just forgot or they made call - the problem here is consistency. Whereas now, everyone who makes an appointment gets a scheduled SMS to remind them, and on the whole the service has worked better than expected with the initial reaction from their clients being that they now felt better looked after than ever, and the response from the customer being that their clients are happier and it's actually meant less effort to provide a greater level of service to their clients - win win. And who ever said there was no such thing!

Individually, why should your business use SMS, well that depends on the application you're looking at using for - OK, so you want to use it for server alerts, you're not going to be the biggest customer in the world, let's make no bones about it, but what size customer to anyone shouldn't make a difference it's the impact that company has on you, so by providing an easy solution for server alerts so that the IT staff can get the messages in a much more direct and timely manner will speak for itself in downtime savings!

Or how about you run a day spa or hairdressers? That's pretty easy to, you're looking at appointment reminders - I remember speaking to another accountancy firm, who no didn't sign up with us, but in fact told me to go somewhere, but in a nicer way because they didn't suffer from broken appointments, well they are probably one of the privileged few, because most businesses that have appointment times will through out the course of time in fact have a number of no shows and there's a cost to that, both in paying for staff to do a job that's not being done because of the broken appointment, and the opportunity cost to the business, where they could have given that appointment time to someone who would have turned up, so to spend 10 or 20 cents on effectively what would be an insurance policy to make sure that doesn't happen makes good business sense.

How about your business runs a call centre of sorts and people are calling in on your 1300/1800 numbers which costs you money, and the longer your staff talks to them the higher the cost to the business to provide that support to that customer - when giving reference details, that would be a case for SMS, sending out basic instructions for your product, again SMS would be a winner there.

But what about email? Unless it's bulk email, it's pretty much free? Yep, you're right it is - but unfortunately it's probably not read, or gone to their junk or spam folder, or because email addresses are either more complicated or longer than a phone number it's much easier to get the wrong address and so the customer never gets the message - they call up and go through it again and fix it up, with your customer being annoyed because it took them time to call back again, and the rising service costs to the business. Plus as I mentioned earlier between the ages of 18-35 SMS is the most popular form of comms anyway, and as they get older the age gaps rises as there doesn't seem to be a decrease in popularity for our teenage cousins so far.

So to sum it up, why SMS for your business? Because it's convenient, delivers consistent service to customers and saves money on labour and in phone calls.

If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Enjoy,
C

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