Consumers prefer to interact with businesses via text over email or voice, according to the results of a recent Flowroute Inc. nationwide survey. Flowroute is a carrier and a software company that provides developers with direct access to telephone number resources including advanced signaling, inbound and outbound calling, and phone numbers.
The survey of more than 1,300 U.S. consumers indicated that this group prefers SMS for appointment reminders (55 percent vs. 35 percent for email), for prescription refills (51 percent vs. 36 percent for email), and service outage notifications (53 percent vs. 34 percent for email). This same group said they read 82 percent of text messages from businesses within five minutes, but open only about one in four emails received by businesses, 95 percent of which they said are not relevant to them.
The Flowroute survey also showed that 68 percent of those surveyed have gotten appointment reminders and prescription refills in the last six months, 67 percent of the respondents have received an SMS in the past six months related to order updates and delivery status, 60 percent have gotten a password reset request or asked a customer service question in this time period, and 52 percent have received communications related to stuff like car sharing or vacation rentals in that time window.
All of the above are indicators that businesses that haven’t already done so need to embrace and implement texting as part of their communications strategy with customers to deliver the optimal customer experiences, says Flowroute, which was a CUSTOMER Product of the Year award winner.
“Businesses that still rely on email to get time-sensitive information and offers to customers have lost their voice,” said Dan Nordale, chief marketing officer at Flowroute. “Consumers increasingly depend on, and demand messaging services that let them interact with businesses in a fast and convenient manner.”
Sean Hsieh, co-founder and chief product officer of Flowroute, gave a presentation at this fall’s AstriCon event in Glendale, Ariz. There, he noted that messaging is on the rise, and that 99 percent of all SMS messages are read by recipients. The three kinds of messaging, he added, are P2P; A2P, which includes short codes and American Idol-style voting; and E2P, in which the E stands for enterprise.
Speaking of industry event presentations, SMS will be the subject of a panel at the upcoming All About the API event, which will be co-located with ITEXPO, an event to take place Feb. 8 through 10 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The “Raising the Bar for SMS – How Cloud Communications APIs are Driving Innovation in Legacy Telco Services” will be held Feb. 10 at 9 a.m.
Edited by
Alicia Young
