Guest Blogger Mitch Lieberman: Unraveling the Mystery of SMS
SMS is a bit Jekyll and Hyde; it's among the most private forms of communication available, yet is extremely social. Therein lays the intrigue.
My question is this: "If someone hands you a business card, there is implied permission to call or email. What about texting?" I started an exploration with a query on Twitter. As responses began to come in, my curiosity was piqued. I began to wonder about where this peculiar channel fits into customer service and social CRM. By giving a mobile number is it an implied permission to use SMS?
"SMS is often like 'phoning from under the table,'" Paul Sweeney, head of innovation at VoiceSage, told me. "Were you ever in a meeting and it was running over time and you had to text a colleague at your next meeting? That's the sort of back door conversation that SMS enables. It's not the main conversation; it augments the main conversation."
Paul's comments struck a nerve. Yet, I was no closer to defining how exactly SMS fits into a channel, social, or communication strategy. I reached out to another friend, Barry Dalton, senior vice president of technology for Telerx.
"When I call you, whether you're a business acquaintance or a dear friend, you have the option of picking up or letting the call go to [voicemail]," he said. "SMS does not afford the receiver the same control. Have you ever sent a text and not gotten a response? What was your feeling? The sender knows the text went through. The expectation is that it will be responded to, pretty immediately; whereas a voicemail left has a lesser expectation of immediate, or any, response. So, in that sense, with that expectation from the sender, I think it is viewed as more invasive and thus more personal. As for person to company, it's not so much the intimacy as it is the expectation of immediate response."
One particular point struck me, and that is that SMS is more invasive. It is not only push, but it is push now! Also, as Barry highlights, there is a bit of uncertainty associated with not receiving a reply to a text. With family, the order is: Are they ok? Is the phone off? Am I being ignored, how rude! With business associates, it is the same list, just in reverse.
The task at hand
So where does SMS fit? When someone hands you a business card, the current standard is phone and email. Often, there are two or more phone numbers: office, mobile and maybe fax.
What are the boundaries of that mobile number? My meaning is, would you expect a new acquaintance to send you a text message? Does this step beyond standard protocol? Is it proper? What if an online form from, say, the cable company, asks for a mobile number? Is the answer the same?
My query came away with fairly clear answers. Prem Kumar, social CRM evangelist for Cognizant, noted to me, "In the business to person realm, in India, it is perfectly acceptable to send an SMS without explicit permissions." Prem noted this to be a technology adoption issue, which it is, in a way. The issue here is actually with the infrastructure surrounding Internet-based technology on mobile devices, where India is further behind, thus SMS is filling a void quite nicely. The answer to "Is it OK?" is the opposite in the U.S., Europe, and other Western cultures: "No, do not send me an SMS unless I give you explicit permission to do so -- period." This includes individual to individual, in addition to business to individual.
So how does text fit into a channel strategy? It is immediate, personal, and in most cases, clearly opt-in. Blend with your channel mix accordingly.
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About the Author: Mitch Lieberman is vice president of product marketing for Sword Ciboodle
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