SMS: The Forgotten Channel or Ready for Rebirth?

  Everyone is writing about upcoming trends in the contact center for 2014.  There's nothing truly new but there is notable growth and increased interest in things like customer journey mapping (I really like Leisa Reichelt's description) and mobile self-service.  We continue to hear voice biometrics/authentication bandied about but outside of insurance and financial services, I have seen almost no adoption (which to me says more about our lack of imagination than it does the capabilities of the solution).

  Maybe what I am noticing is the gap between trendy solutions that analysts love to write about (remember Nina and Lexee) and practical solutions that customers actually use.  Voice is still by far the most dominant channel in the contact center but web self-service, virtual assistants, chat, social media, and email all have their place.  The reason these channels dominate is simple: there is no technical or experiential  barrier to their use.  Yes, most anyone could download a mobile virtual assistant, but when to use it?  I think most of us would still feel awkward using a mobile virtual assistant in public to do anything other than play a song in iTunes or set a quick reminder.  I personally cringe at the idea of speaking my credit card number or credentials into my phone in public.  I could do these things in the privacy of my home but then the convenience of speech is only marginally better than using my iPad.  For a customer contact solution to take hold it needs to be easy to access, available when the customer wants to use it, quick, and effective.

  I can think of one technology that fits these criteria, has been around for more than twenty years, and yet is still underutilized: SMS.

  In May of this year I participated in a roundtable for contact center managers and what I heard really surprised me.  Of all of the channels they were supporting or deploying, SMS was receiving the most interest from customers and many of them were planning to deploy it in 2014.

  Why had I not heard this before?  I started thinking about my own experiences with SMS as a support channel.  My power utility allows me to submit outage notifications via SMS (something I had to do this morning!).  My mobile carrier conducts satisfaction surveys via SMS.  Submitting the power outage could not have been easier (much faster than calling an IVR) and I completed the satisfaction survey over several hours when it was convenient for me to answer each question (I rarely have the time or patience for a telephone survey).  Some people still pay per SMS (my Dad hates it when I send him a text) but for many of us, it is the perfect channel for certain (obviously not all) types of support inquiries. 

  Here are just a few great uses of SMS:

• Order Confirmation
• Multi-Factor Authentication
• Trouble ticket creation
• Resolution notification
• Brief surveys
• Field Service Dispatch
• Field Service ticket updates / close-out

  If you are reading this and thinking, this is old news, then please ask yourself, why have we not seen wider adoption in the contact center - especially when customers seem to be asking for it?  Maybe it is precisely because it is not sexy or new and maybe there is doubt in the C-Suite about whether customers want or need another channel.  Or maybe it is because few CRMs or contact center platforms support it (I have worked on several of these deployments and they required some custom work but nowhere near the level of effort of a Natural Language application). Despite these challenges at least some of the leaders I have spoken with plan on adding SMS to the channels they support.

  There is a lot of life left in SMS and a lot of potential to serve customers quickly and conveniently.  Hopefully some creative CX designers will pick it up and bring us some new and exciting uses for this old, but hardly irrelevant, technology.