While the very essence of time has not changed, people feel busier in this digital age. This has to be recognized by brands and the single, most important factor consumers view as being important to them when interacting with companies is that – you guessed it – their time is valued.
The floodgates are open: enterprises and their customers have myriad digital channels available to them, but the sheer number can lead to confusion. Add to this already saturated ecosystem the fact that people feel busier than they have ever been before, and the net result is that clarity and succinctness in business messaging have never been more important.
Consumers demand relevance at every turn and marketing, transactional and informative updates from brands add real value to their lives. When they grow to feel pressured by the number of interactions they receive–finding little value in the content itself—this is when their loyalty can be sorely tested.
Valuing your users’ time
We’ve all heard just some of the following terms: time-poor, time-starved, time scarcity, time poverty, time pressure, leisure gap, cult of busyness, harried, and overscheduled. Many people have this overriding feeling that they’re ‘pressed for time’, that there’s ‘never enough time in the day’ and that they are ‘running out of time’.
While the very essence of time has not changed, people feel busier in this digital age. This has to be recognized by brands and the single, most important factor consumers view as being important to them when interacting with companies is that – you guessed it – their time is valued.
During 1983’s International Design Conference in Aspen, Steve Jobs foresaw a future in which each person had “an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes.” He wasn’t wrong, was he?
The app conundrum
A typical smartphone user now has between 60 and 90 apps downloaded yet spends the majority of their time using just a handful of them daily. There’s huge competition amongst apps for peoples’ attention.
If you sit back and think a moment, there truly is an app for just about everything today. With the App Store home to over 2.2 million apps and with the Google Play store having north of 3.5 million on its shelves (according to Statista), it can justifiably feel that every business has a mobile app.
It’s easy to understand just how tempting it can be for even small, local businesses to join the app roadshow. Anything that has the potential to gain traction with customers to boost business has to be positive. But given the competing mobile engagement channels out there in the CPaaS arena (A2P SMS, chat apps, email, and voice to name a few), an app has to offer something beyond the functionality of a mobile-optimized website. It has to add real value. Many apps don’t, the truth is, there are too many apps. Complicating matters further, fewer than 44% of iOS users opt in to push notifications, so even if a business can convince a user to download their app, less then half will receive A2P messaging on this channel. The ‘pop-up’ style of many push notifications can also trigger some web 1.0 PTSD, hence the relatively low reaction rate of 4.9%.
If a business does have a great app that enhances the customer experience, that’s great. But if you’re looking for the best channel that doesn’t ask users to add any elements to their mobile device in order to stay connected, the answer is SMS. A2P SMS messaging boasts open rates as high as 98%, and it absolutely does need to figure in your engagement strategy. While enterprises need to support all the channels their customers feel most comfortable with, the temptation to go overboard and hit the same customer broadside using multiple channels at the same time needs to be kept in check.
Acing client engagement is not an easy task but ensuring your customers are not overwhelmed and feel valued is a great start. With Mitto in your corner, any organization can take advantage of everything that an omnichannel solution suite brings to the table – and all through a single API. Just as with so much in life, successful mobile engagement is about balance. Just ensure value at every turn; wield omnichannel strategically and it has the power to do exactly that.
