B2C: The Place to Be
The business-to-consumer (B2C) space is where the real excitement will be. By definition, "B2C" means "customer facing," so these are technologies that will be of increasing importance in getting a company's products into consumers' hands. You will recall that texting's first widespread adoption was on the now defunct AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and that was driven by Millennials. Those Millennials have now become everyone's target market.
All of the contact center vendors have come to recognize the growing importance of text in building and maintaining customer relationships, but which text solution (or solutions) can best accomplish that goal? Companies with a strong enough value proposition like Uber and Amazon can distribute apps that can drive the entire customer purchase and fulfillment process. Uber has gone the farthest in integrating SMS into their operations.
Web chat is an adequate vehicle for simple Q&A exchanges with buyers, but that addresses the one-time sale as opposed to that goal of long-term customer engagement. Contact centers are adding text to their list of communication channels to engage customer service, and AI and chat bots are beginning to automate that interaction.
The contact center suppliers face two challenges here, the first is to maintain their role in providing customer service as consumers' medium of choice shifts from voice to text, and secondly, to deploy the optimal configuration of AI-driven bots and human interaction to maximize the customer experience and drive future sales.
The biggest challenge to the contact centers' hold on customer interactions is now coming from the premium text providers. Tencent's WeChat pioneered the idea of expanding text to encompass other applications in the Chinese market, and that idea has now migrated to the U.S. Facebook Messenger currently has 1.3 billion users on its app, and allows businesses to manage their own Facebook presence. Meanwhile, WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook) launched launched its WhatsApp Business app in mid-2017 (initially only on Android), and it is clearly looking to leverage its 1 billion+ users worldwide. Unfortunately, those solutions threaten to cut the contact center out of the interaction.
The contact center platforms have upped their game and can now send SMS alerts, but SMS is the "last choice," not the first. The most interesting development was Apple's Business Chat, announced at Apple's 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference. With Business Chat, Apple is essentially opening its Messages app to contact centers, allowing companies to maintain WeChat-like persistent chats with customers and prospects in hopes of building longer-term customer relationships.
As I noted in a No Jitter postpost last year, Business Chat is integrated with Safari, Apple Pay, Apple Maps, and other iOS applications so users can navigate a purchase within the familiar Apple ecosystem. Business Chat also provides built-in functions to support typical use cases, like Time Picker, which allows an agent to send options for potential appointment times (which link to the iOS calendar) and List Picker, which allows users to select available options like colors or sizes with a single click. Currently contact center solutions provider Genesys is implementing Business Chat capabilities that I anticipate they will be describing at Enterprise Connect next month.
Conclusion: You've Got to Be In the Text Game
The popularity of text may have originated with AIM, but it grew to fruition with the adoption of mobile texting, first through SMS and eventually through the premium texting platforms. While text has been a critical building block in both UC&C and team collaboration, it is important to recognize user behavior is leaving those deployments far outside the mainstream of the text market. Being "disconnected" is not a positive attribute for a "communications service."
With mobile UC, the UC&C suppliers have already proved that users won't put up with a less convenient way to do the same thing, whether it's making a phone call or sending a text. We really don't need to learn that lesson again.
However, this is a challenge that enterprise communications vendors will have to address if they are going to survive and thrive. Computer and networking technologies may have originated in the enterprise space, but tides have shifted. Now consumer technology has come to dominate, and the enterprise communications businesses remain as profitable islands -- but the sea level is rising.
Like mobile UC before it, text is now defining the existential challenge enterprise suppliers are facing. What many of us came to realize years ago, consumer technologies are not "complements" to enterprise offering, they're competitors! The single biggest challenge facing those enterprise suppliers will be how they are able to manage their relationships with the providers who control those increasing important vehicles like text. That interplay will be on full display at Enterprise Connect 18, and I hope you'll be there to watch the story unfold.
Learn more about mobility at Enterprise Connect 2018, March 12 to 15, in Orlando, Fla. Register now using the code NOJITTER to save an additional $200 off the Early Bird Pricing or get a free Expo Plus pass.
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