Every Business Should be ‘Textable’
Hundreds of millions of messages are sent every day across major apps: Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram have all eaten the world of private messaging. In today’s reality where families, friends and relationships exist miles apart, Telcos were too slow over the last two decades to offer a great, affordable service to help enable this human connection. Instead they relied on expensive SMS packages that forced people to look elsewhere turning to alternatives.
Blackberry Messenger in 2005 was a pioneer in enabling P2P messaging networks, skipping over the limitations of SMS and when Apple released the same functionality in iMessage a few years later, the democratization of this non-SMS messaging network exploded.
SMS is Now Undergoing a Renaissance in Business
In 2020 messaging has become decentralized, depending on where people live and play, you have to navigate specific apps to talk to different people. Here’s a use-case I am sure you are all too familiar with: using Slack for work, Messenger & Instagram for friends and social networking, Snap for a different group of friends, WhatsApp for international friends and SMS for only the closest friends and family. And what about e-mail? Remember that?
We live in a world of continuous communication. This is the world e-mail promised but the irony is that e-mail now feels akin to postage mail. Add to the fact that amongst Millennials and GenZ calling has all but disappeared. We prefer the ability to weave in and out of conversations, never anchored to one person at a time. Search is Dead: Long Live Immediacy
Smart businesses have already adapted to this new reality, plugging into Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and enabling ‘AI’ chatbots to respond to consumers’ ‘always-on’ demands. What these systems enable is the ability for a business to extend beyond a static webpage and transform into a ‘conversational platform’. The website is now what it was always meant to be: just the businesses’ storefront while the chat functionality the equivalent of a manager or sales rep. Rather than navigating messy pages and risk permanent churn because prospectivee customrs could not find the relevant information, you can capture visitors in real time, when you have their interest.
We’d like to say that businessees are adapting, but the reality is that many rely on the strategy of the last 10 years: build a website, enable a ‘contact us’ email and sit and wait. It is a completely static experience that puts the onus on the customer to go out of their way to seak information.
This is completely out of touch with the always-on on-demand economy and behavior that this new generations expects and is building. In fact, even having a dedicated app that offers little functionality over a website is no longer sufficient.
My core belief is the therefore the following: every business should be reachable via text.
Texting is native to every phone and has spent that last 15 years manifesting itself into our cultural fabric. In the same way every business eventually adopted landlines, then email, websites, insta pages etc, it is mind-boggling that businesses are so still so difficult to reach today to extract critical information online. I believe that I should be able to text any business any question and receive a response.
You might think its absurd to have a business be ‘always-on’ but I believe that the core to any great business, second to a great product, is fantastic customer support. In fact it may be even more essential because what good is a phenomenal product or business if I can’t find the information that is relevant to me and my needs?
What about chat-bots? Love em’. I think they help answer about 50% of the recurring questions re: business hours / menus / services etc. but they act as a 1–800 routing system and don’t account for the other 50% of questions and situations e.g.: can I get a specific table for a date I care about? Can your service offer me X functionality that I cannot explicitly see on your website? Most importantly: can I talk to a damn person for once!
Slack is the Great Bridge Between External & Internal Comms
Slack has exploded over the last 5 years, going north of 12 million active users pre-COVID. Slack’s unrivaled feature is not better internal communications, its better internal communication, about business operations. The fact that companies can live inside of different channels means that once these channels pipe in information from the ‘real world’, you now automatically have a shared inbox your team members can collaborate with, in real-time. Here are some great use-cases I’ve used and have seen other startups leverage to interact with the ‘real world’:
- Integrate Twitter and enable the marketing team collaborate in real-time to craft responses to Twitter comms
- Integrate a CRM so teams can rally around appropriate sales / marketing / customer success inquiries
- Integrate logistics notifications so an entire e-commerce team can coordinate with customers on delayed shipments or suppliers
I see a world where Slack truly eliminates the need for e-mail by having collaborative inboxes, which are just shared channels. The problem is the fact that Slack is land-locked to internal communication right now.
You need to react to information piped into Slack, with another, dedicated tool. Want to respond to that Tweet? Go to Twitter. Customer support? Go to your CRM. These nifty little integrations have popped up for years.
Enter SMS: Using Slack to Respond to External Communications
It makes sense that Slack is not a ubiquitous, all-encompassing workplace today. You need to be able to focus on your core product and Slack’s CEO has even openly admitted post-IPO how much work Slack needs to become a product everyone will use. Add to the fact that most companies like Twitter or Salesforce may not love that folks are spending so much time off their platform.
Because SMS is a ‘un-owned’ platform — it is the lowest hanging fruit to building on top of Slack. Imagine being able to send and receive messages to people’s phones, all through Slack? You don’t need a web-app, a dedicated smartphone app or any other ‘middleware’ — just a native Slack SMS app.
That’s exactly what two friends of mine have built: Clerk.Chat — a Slackbot that gives you a virtual ‘Smart Phone’ that enables sending and receiving SMS, all in Slack. Don’t take my word for the fact that’s its a brilliant idea, Clerk made it to #4 on Product Hunt in an early release in February. Now counting dozens of paying customers and hundreds of installs, its looking like a home-run. You simply install Clerk, choose a number in your area code, and start texting or enabling the ability to receive texts. You can invite Clerk to your support channel and start receiving SMS with the entire team able to respond in real-time. Its better than e-mail and I’m extremely excited about its potential.
Who needs an app anymore? SMS is the new platform
My friends have said they’ve seen several founders adopt Slack + Clerk to test out ideas for their next business. They build a quick landing page, post a few sentences about their offering and start collecting phone numbers. They can then engage with their audience all via text.
SMS right through Slack.
Clerk SMS for Marketing
With a read rate of 90%+ SMS is definitely more potent and successful than e-mail. Several of their customers are now using Clerk to send out campaigns to their audience to help keep them hyper-engaged. No more emails going to spam — just authentic communication that feels human again. SMS has a voice that can come through better than emails riddled with logos, CTAs and long-form text.
The bigger point is the fact that teams can respond to inbound messages means that there is now an engaged audience that can interact with your brand in real-time. This was the promise of Twitter but Slack can actually power this.
I put a textable number up on my Twitter feed and had an overwhelming response for only 500 followers. Folks who wanted to get in touch with me but thought I’d never respond to my DMs were thrilled when I responded, stating they loved it was all ‘off-app’ it felt real.
It is real. I hope you join this new ‘old’ reality of communication!
Disclosure: I am an advisor and friend of the founders of Clerk.Chat (Igor Boshoer & Will Chertoff. All opinions expressed are my own. Consume them at your own risk / opportunity.
