Does Mobile Messaging really increase engagement? What is your experience? Are enterprises slow in adapting to it?

I read a lot on Mobile Messaging, how it can connect people and help in better engagement. I started thinking from my own experience how things changed in the last 15 years on the way people communicated with each other.

In year 1999, when I came to the US first time, making an overseas telephone call was very expensive. There were less expensive calling cards, but those lines had call quality issues and some cards needed to be completed in one go. So, it used to be once-a-fortnight activity to call my parents and friends overseas on weekends. After few years the telephone calling plans cost reduced but still expensive, so once-a-fortnight activity of making long distance calls became once-a-week activity, still a cautious spend!

I used to send pictures of my newborn kid to my parents through postal mail and it normally used to take 10 days or so to reach them, and again it was expensive. Email was not an effective and interactive medium with its own limitations. Interactions with people within the country with long distance calls were not much different. Information sharing and engagement was very limited.

When the internet usage and peer to peer communication services came to mainstream, Skype became a household name. It made instant communication with texting possible, but still video call quality was bad because of bandwidth constraints. Again, it required for me to sit in front of the computer to make those calls.

Afterwards came the smart phones and broadband revolution that brought new apps: WhatsApp, WeChat or FB Messenger, in addition to Skype. Now my niece and nephew use WhatsApp and message me almost every day, irrespective of whether I am online or not. My children share their pictures with their grandparents over mobile with just a click of a button. For every small occasion we get onto a Skype video call on mobile and share the moment anywhere and anytime.

I feel much closer to the people I interact on these media, WhatsApp or Skype, sending messages or picture almost every day from my mobile. Things have changed a lot on the way we interact and I feel I am better connected now. The Millennials are especially well-connected on their mobile devices. What is your experience?

When we look at enterprises, many are still using the age-old telephone system to connect to customers or business partners. The problems with the age-old telephone system are the same that we had a decade back, you are not sure when you will get the other person onto the line, support hours are limited, your conversations are restricted to audio and you can’t share any images. This obviously makes the interactions less engaging.

With mobile messaging becoming mainstream for person to person communication, why is it still in the early stages for business to consumer or business to business communication? What is required for enterprises to adapt to this technology? Please share your thoughts. I would love to hear from you.

You can refer to other blogs on how this technology can transform the industry and share your comments.

Radha Krishna is a Customer Success Officer at SnapSolv, a cloud based business messaging platform for mobile. He's currently helping enterprises realize the benefits of adapting to next great mobile messaging technology for customer and partner success.