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There’s a powerful tool at the fingertips – literally – of every business to com- municate with their clients, but few are taking advantage of it: text messaging. Yes, the short messaging service (or SMS, the technical term for text mes- saging) can be a powerful tool for brokers. Customers want to communicate with businesses via text but businesses are dragging their feet.
EZ Texting, a texting software company, found that small businesses are miss- ing out on opportunities like promoting products, generating leads, and making sales – all of which would help grow their business – by not texting their custom- ers. Almost 70% of customers told the company in a survey that they want to connect with businesses via text, but only 13% of the organizations in the survey reported that they are in fact texting their customers.
According to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Com- mission, the regulatory agency for broadcasting and telecommunications, there were 31.7 million mobile subscribers in Canada in 2017. That suggests 87% of Ca- nadians owned a cellphone (and 78% owned a smartphone). Between 2014-17, Ca- nadians sent and received an average of 513 million text messages daily.
“We find that the majority of the customers prefer text message communication for reminders, versus older communication methods such as phone calls, letters or emails,” says Scott Irwin, technical director of Brokerlink Software Inc., a soft- ware solutions provider for auto insurance in British Columbia. The company has offered an automated texting and email reminder service called BCautorenew for the last six years. Brokers in the province use the software to send customized and personal text and email reminders when a policy is expiring.
Its emergence is reminiscent of email. Businesses were slow to adopt the meth- od because, they rationalized, who would want to communicate through an elec- ronic message when you could call them? Nowadays, the phone is quite literally right there in your client’s pocket, only it’s not a phone call they want – it’s a text.
“Text messaging is less intrusive than phone calls,” Irwin adds. “A phone call can occur during a very inconvenient time. A text message, on the other hand, can be read and replied to when it is the most convenient for the customer.”
Texting is quick and virtually guaranteed to be read, according to EZ Texting, which reports that nearly 100% of all text messages are read; half of them within three minutes of arriving. Greg Kruk, partner at Toronto-area brokerage Sentinel Risk Insurance Group, attributed that to the intimate nature of a text message compared to the informality of an email.
“There’s more of a personal touch with text,” he explains. “If you have a text relationship with your broker or insurance company, it seems to be a bit more intimate than email. It’s usually a one-on-one communication over text.”
In contrast to a canned email that reads “Dear valued customer,” a text mes- sage is more specific to the client’s personal situation. Basically, it’s not spam, says Adam Mitchell, president of Mitchell & Whale, a brokerage in Whitby, Ont.
“Your cellphone doesn’t have a spam bucket. It’s not currently inundated with a lot of other spam,” he said. “People are paying way more attention to SMS than they are to their email. I don’t know about you, but I can’t keep up with my email. But I text almost everyone back and certainly read most everything [that is texted to me].”
TEXTING CLIENTS l FEATURE
canadianunderwriter.ca | February 2020 31