While text messaging may no longer be the first choice for person-to-person (P2P) messaging; in the business sector the use of SMS Application-to-person (A2P) messaging is skyrocketing. In fact, Ovum predicts that by 2019, businesses will send 1.28 trillion messages annually, up from 1.16 trillion in 2016.
So what are the key factors driving this growth?
In addition to mapping the future of emerging enterprise messaging formats like RCS and chat bots, our recent 2017 Enterprise Messaging Survey, published in partnership with Ovum, engages with organizations across seven countries and multiple verticals to explore key trends in A2P SMS.
Here are the 10 key A2P takeaways from the report:
- Texting is becoming more actionable; with 23% of respondents increasing their use of two-way texting in the previous 12 months to allow consumers to reschedule an appointment or have a text-based conversation with a contact center agent, for example.
- Innovation is driving growth, with companies continually discovering new and innovative use cases for A2P. These cover a wide range of transactional and promotional purposes, including appointment reminders, two-factor authentication, text donations, advertising and marketing, and mobile and gift vouchers.
- SMS remains one of the most reliable channels for sending marketing and promotional messages, which is why 42% and 35% respondents, respectively, have increased their use of text messaging for these purposes over the past year.
- Ease of access is key; with 48% businesses sending more SMS messages than 12 months ago, this is due to the growing availability of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to easily connect their customer engagement platforms directly to those of their SMS provider.
- Price elasticity continues to play a role in the A2P SMS ecosystem, with 54% of respondents saying they would send more A2P SMS traffic if the price per A2P SMS message was reduced.
- Businesses are poised for an SMS upgrade, as Google will soon launch RCS (Rich Communications Service) Business Messaging, with 37% saying that new features such as personalized branding, enriched content delivery, and read receipts would encourage them to send more SMS.
THE chat bot will play a significant role in increasing A2P message traffic, with 371 TP3T of respondents saying that more sophisticated and intelligent chatbot platforms would increase their SMS traffic. This demonstrates that businesses are already recognizing the role that SMS-based chatbots play in enabling two-way SMS.
- SMS is poised to play a growing role both as a fallback for OTT-based chat bots and as a trusted channel for organizations to send consumers links to their chat bots to start a conversation.
Price elasticity in SMS is alive and well, with the highest percentage of respondents, 35%, indicating that their monthly SMS traffic would increase between two and four times if an unlimited fixed-price SMS option were available. - Messaging continues to be a key mobile interaction channel between businesses and their customers. SMS's universal availability on mobile devices, with global reach and interoperability, makes it attractive to businesses seeking a simple, cost-effective, and reliable way to address multiple use cases within their operations.
