The Text Phase of Service Delivery

The increasing ubiquity of SMS text messages opens the door to a new era of proactive customer communication. SoundBite Communications has capitalised on the mobile banking boom by recently launching a host of applications tailor-made for the financial services industry.

US consumers send 80bn text messages a month on their mobile phones, according to the Mercator Advisory Group and US financial service providers send 12m text messages per day, adds the Massachusetts-based research and advisory services firm.

Most of the messages are service-related messages permitted by the account holder – such as alerts sent to notify customers when a transaction has occurred or that a current account is close to being overdrawn.

SoundBite, which recently launched an SMS platform offering the ability to provide real-time, two-way text communications linked to the bank’s call centre, hails its Contact Text Messaging Solution as a new channel for retail financial service delivery. The solution leverages SoundBite’s Dialog Engine and Agent Text Portal, features available on the latest 2009 release of SoundBite Engage, is the new version of SoundBite's multi-channel communications platform.

"Proactive customer communication is the new customer service model," said Alan Berrey, SoundBite’s vice-president for business development, emerging solutions.

"There is a tremendous amount of noise around the channels, and the more options, the more noise. So the solution allows us to do everything from design to execution to measurement and optimisation, driving messages that would have entered the call centre into the text channel."

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