“As the frenzy over Twitter continues, the realisation of just what can be achieved in a targeted 160-character message is beginning to dawn on businesses. A number of transactions can be completed using a BlackBerry or email; however this requires a big investment, rendering the opportunity impractical for a majority.
An increasing number of companies are now using one-way SMS to confirm appointments or delivery times. But the critical challenge they all face is how to enable the recipient to respond in a way that closes the loop and completes an automated database transaction.
By simply adding a unique two-way SMS facility onto an existing business process, the automated workflow is successfully extended, boosting the customer/employee experience, without increasing costs. With two-way SMS the business possibilities are endless; authorisations and job status updates can be verified and confirmed in an instant, automatically triggering the next action in the database.
The significant development making all of this possible is the introduction of a solution that couples an incoming text message with the original outgoing message. This means the content of that reply can be fed back directly into the organisation’s database so that the next step in the process can be taken - all without any intervention by a human processor.
With the ‘reply’ conundrum addressed, SMS promises to be a small but significant revolution in the business-customer/business-employee relationship - breaking down boundaries, enabling direct interaction and bringing greater speed and efficiency into the equation.”