Besides talking, text messaging is one of the most used functions of cell phones. Many people send from several hundred to 1,000 (or even more) text messages via mobile phone a month. That’s why mobile operators have been adopting a sender pays model around the world. This model helps recipients have better control over the received text messages. There are many other models that also affect text messaging use. Yet, many of them are impractical or ineffective in business.
Uses of Texting in Business
Text messaging can be used for different business purposes. Let’s take a look at some uses of texting in business.
Enterprise operations
A lot of enterprises have implemented smartphones and handheld mobile devices with the goal to track the delivery progress. Through text messaging, the call centers notify the delivery employees about the pick-ups. This enterprise-centric system allows a message is being instantly sent when a worker confirms an order by phone.
Monitoring
Some businesses make use of text messaging to alert failing servers. For this purpose, they implement an out-of-band (OOB) monitoring system. It monitors a number of Web hosts and sends the alerts by means of various separate channels. In this case, text messages are used as a monitoring mechanism.
Notifications of events
Notification via texting has already been implemented by some courier companies like TNT and FedEx. If done properly, text messaging is a great way to provide a customer experience and gain a competitive advantage on the cheap.
Informational purposes
The majority of businesses utilize text messaging for informational purposes. Many organizations use texting by cell phones to keep their staff updated on the latest activities or offers relevant to their business. Text messaging via cell phone has the advantage over the messaging via e-mail, since it provides more real-time communication. By the way, more people own the cell phones than the personal e-mail accounts.
Business Text Message Services
Aside from numerous business models behind texting, there are a lot of text message services for marketing companies. Those services offer a number of reporting features for businessmen, enabling them to track and manage their mobile marketing campaigns. Besides tracking marketing campaigns, text message services can be used for other business purposes as well. For example, you can utilize them for multimedia messages, group tracking, voting & polling, scheduled messages, message personalization, and so on.
Just to mention some of the most popular text message services among businesses:
- SlickText
- SUMOTEXT
- ProTexting
- Trumpia
- SimpleTexting
- Mozeo
- Ez Texting
- Mobiniti
- TXT180
- Wire2Air
Although text messaging has brought a lot of benefits for businesses, it can be dangerous in some situations. Many businessmen prefer texting while driving, which could be a very risky activity. Texting while driving isn’t safe for both drivers and other traffic participants around them. Drivers distracted by texting while driving were responsible for about 515,000 injuries and roughly 6,000 deaths in the United States last year.
The popularity of texting for business purposes is on the rise all around the globe. This is because the potential of messaging by cell phone is virtually unlimited. It’s quite likely that text messaging will preserve its attraction for many businesses in the coming years.