Text: The Hottest Mobile Topic at EC18?Text: The Hottest Mobile Topic at EC18?
Text has become indispensable as both a communications tool for business users and for interacting with customers.
February 13, 2018
Of all the mobility topics on tap for Enterprise Connect 2018, the one I'm watching most closely is text.
Text has become an indispensible communications tool for business users and an essential element in Internet marketing. Text is also a market where the UC providers have been largely shut out. The other factor that makes this technology area so interesting is that the text market poses many of the same challenges that the UC suppliers faced a few years back in addressing the mobile market, an area where they remain a non-factor to this day. From a macro standpoint, this is another arena where traditional enterprise suppliers are being pitted against consumer mobile technologies.
Text and UC cross paths in two important areas: internal employee-to-employee (E2E) chat and external business-to-consumer (B2C) chat. The former falls under the purview of UC&C and team collaboration platforms, while the latter is an enormously important factor in the contact center business. So for both cloud and premises-based UC providers, both applications represent significant revenue streams.
To begin with, everyone loves text, but the text market is populated by some very powerful players. "Text" comes in a lot of different forms, the UC platforms being just one of them. Looking at the text market, I break the options down into three major segments:
Mobile Operator Provided SMS and MMS: This is the least common denominator in mobile texting. This option represents a minimal functionality offering (though the carriers hope to change that with Rich Communications Services (RCS) should Apple ever decide to join in) that has the unique advantage of being able to reach every mobile phone on earth via telephone numbers. On a mobile device the SMS/MMS capability is often integrated with other messaging functions (e.g. Apple Messages). Through communications platform as a service (CPaaS), UC&C, and other mechanisms, we can now extend SMS via IP networks to select wired devices.
Premium Texting Platforms: This would include a few obvious choices and potentially some others. Apple Messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger dominate the U.S. market today, and others like WeChat have built somewhat unique ecosystems in other parts of the world. Besides their obvious popularity, the other key feature of the premium services is that they can be selective about with whom they interconnect. And if you do get to interconnect, it will be on their terms.
Specialized Texting Systems: This is the category where UC&C and team collaboration texting capabilities reside. This category would also include Web chat systems and the specialized secure archivable texting solutions that are required in government, financial services, and other security-sensitive environments. What characterizes these options is their closed nature (most don't even interconnect with SMS), and the inherent frailty of their raison d'etre. The question these suppliers must answer constantly just to stay in business, is, "What do I need you for, anyway?"
Now let's take a closer look at the two areas where text and UC intersect, E2E texting and B2C communications.
E2E Texting
The case of employee-to-employee (E2E) texting in UC&C and team collaboration platforms is most closely aligned with what we saw in the mobile UC debacle. Once again we have the UC community going head to head with one of the most creatively powerful industries on earth, consumer mobility.
As with mobile UC, the challenge for UC&C and team collaboration will be that raison d'etre. Outside of regulated industries where there are strict mandates surrounding the use of defined secure texting alternatives, the vast majority of enterprise texting today uses the familiar consumer tools. I haven't seen any serious market research on that, but just look around. So as was the case with mobile UC, we'll be asking users to change their behavior.
Mobile UC provided the ability to make a phone call just like you could already do with your mobile phone. The only difference was, the mobile UC way was far less convenient. The ability for mobile UC developers to integrate the iPhone dialer with Apple's CallKit to deliver an "almost seamless" user experience was a step in the right direction, but I've yet to see any major user uptake as a result.
The mobile UC app could offer some features of nebulous value like the ability to view your contacts' presence status or to keep your cell number private, but opening a mobile UC app just to make a business phone call was simply too big an ask for the vast majority of users.
UC&C and team collaboration texting presents a similar challenge, to wit: I can send a business text to internal or external correspondents today with the same familiar tool I use to text to my spouse -- why change? I noted as early as 2014, team collaboration solutions could turn the tide for mobile UC. That argument was predicated on the hope that users would flock to these new tools and come to depend on them to coordinate much of their day-to-day work. With this dynamic, mobile access would become indispensible. I'm waiting to see how widely and how rapidly enterprise team collaboration solutions catch on to gauge how effective they are at redirecting that texting behavior.
Click to the next page for a closer look at B2CB2C: 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.
Related content:
Apple's Business Chat: Big News for Contact Centers
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