South African companies are starting to wake up to the potential of SMS (or cellular text-messaging) as a means of streamlining internal communications.
The strengths of SMS for permission-based external marketing - its immediacy, speed, reliability, reach, low barrier to entry and interactivity - apply equally to internal communications. It is an especially useful tool for companies that have a large and geographically dispersed workforce.
In most organisations, the workforce is increasingly mobile and many companies also make extensive use of remote workers and contractors that may not necessarily work in their offices most of the time. Cellular messaging is a cost-effective way of keeping in touch with them.
Because of its immediacy, SMS is particularly well suited to sending out time-sensitive information such as requests for urgent meetings, time-limited promotional offers for staff, price changes and customer service alerts.
Most people keep their cellphones on hand, even when they are away on business or holiday, and frequently check for new messages. It`s a discrete medium, too, which means that a manager can solicit information from employees without needing to phone them while they`re busy with a customer, for example.
All of that means the company can be reasonably sure it is reaching most of its employees with time-critical information wherever they are.
One of the biggest advantages SMS offers is its immediacy. Once a company has set up an SMS-based messaging system, it can send out personalised messages to all employees, specific groups of employees like all sales staff or the marketing department or an individual staff member within minutes if the need arises.
Because of its immediacy, SMS is particularly well suited to sending out time-sensitive information.
Doug Mattheus, marketing director, Nashua Mobile
It`s also cheap and convenient for an employee to tap in an immediate response to the message. SMS in many cases will generate more responses and more quickly from staff than e-mailed messages, making it a good way of collecting data such as market reports from employees.
SMS also complements other corporate communication channels. Companies can send extracts of information contained within the corporate intranet site that could be sent to users at all locations. This information could be highlights of financial results or major announcements, for example.
Companies can also send an alert to staff members asking them to check company notice boards or the intranet to see the details of a new announcement.
Messaging services enable companies to send high volumes of time-critical information via SMS from any PC to any handset, wherever its owner is. The technology needs little in the way of extra infrastructure to support it and little training is required for the staff who will use it.
In the future, as phones ready for multimedia messaging services (MMS) start to proliferate in their user communities, businesses will be able to use messaging in even more powerful ways. Companies will be able to send rich audio, video and visual content from their intranets directly to users` phones, for example.
Future data applications that are likely to evolve from SMS include video conferencing and location-based services. However, a world of multimedia messaging is some way off since operators still need to sort out costing and interoperability issues.
Nashua Mobile sponsors ITWeb`s cellular industry portal. Take technology advances, growing customer demands, a changing regulatory environment, ongoing competition and it becomes clear that this market will remain as dynamic as ever. This portal tracks the changes and challenges in this sector.
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